A couple of weeks ago, when Mallory Marrs, avid Twitter user and sophomore, opened her Twitter account, she was met with confused tweets from her friends and followers in response to her tweets from earlier that day. According to Marrs, tweets had been sent from her account that advertised a weight loss program.

Marrs had been hacked.

“People kept texting me, ‘Hey, your account’s been hacked.’ So I went and changed my password,” Marrs said. “I kind of laughed about it and didn’t take it too seriously, even though I probably should have. I’ve seen it happen to a lot of other people.”

Marrs is not the only one who has been hacked lately. According to a Feb. 24 article in The New York Times, many prominent organizations, including Burger King, Jeep, NBC News, USA Today, the Westboro Baptist Church and even the “hacktivist” group Anonymous, have recently had their online accounts hacked. These high-profile incidents raises questions about online security.

Marrs said she did not know how someone had received access to her account and that she wasn’t sure how to prevent it from happening again.

“I have no idea how (the hack) happened. Someone found out my password somehow, and I know it wasn’t one of my friends,” Marrs said.

Computer science teacher Margaret Winans said she has several friends who have gotten hacked and that hacking is a common issue, especially in such a cyber-oriented society.

According to Winans, students should use common sense when they receive questionable content.

“I get a lot of things sent to me from old students or people I know with links on them telling me to click on them. I don’t know what the link goes to because I’m not going to click on it, but I know they wouldn’t have purposely sent me or any of their other teachers that link,” Winans said.

Joey Miller, AP Computer Science student and sophomore, said he has never been hacked and that hacking is easily preventable in most cases. Miller said he believes the reason so many people have gotten hacked is that people do not pay attention or do not know what they are doing.

“I know how not to get hacked,” Miller said. “Make sure to always check your address bars to make sure the address is right, especially on sites like Twitter, where they’ll give you a link that might look like it says ‘twitter.com,’ and they ask you for your password. That’s a great way to get hacked.”

Miller also said he advises people to be careful with what they do with their passwords and with whom they share them.

According to Winans, an easy way for people to avoid getting hacked is to watch what they click on.

“You can hover over some of those links with your cursor and see that it’s really going somewhere else,” Winans said.

Miller said it is important for people to be careful with what they click on, especially advertisements.

“If something looks suspicious, it probably is,” Miller said. “Advertisements are often geared toward whatever page you’re viewing, so if you see like a big, shiny button on a site that normally doesn’t have big, shiny buttons, (then) the big, shiny button is designed to make it look like it’s part of that site. But really, it isn’t, and it’s probably going to get you hacked.”

According to Miller, there are many reasons for hackers to target victims, but it usually involves money.

“Usually it has something to do with an advertising scam. It often comes back to money; either they want your credit card number or something, or they want to use your likeness to make them money,” Miller said. “It’s not hard to get hacked, but it’s not hard to prevent it, either.”

Marrs said she hasn’t changed much about her online activity, but she is more cautious in general.

“It just happened. Life goes on. Just try not to let it happen again,” Marrs said.