Is there something strange about your Netflix account? They’ve probably stolen your login credentials. Here’s what to do to protect your Netflix account
Maybe you don’t know this but someone right now may be in front of their smartphone or TV watching a movie or series streaming on Netflix using your account. Maybe it’s your friend, relative, or someone you’ve given your login information to. Or it’s a complete stranger and maybe he’s on the other side of the world and managed to get your Netflix username and password fraudulently. But how to find out who is stealing your Netflix account and how to block them?
The first thing to do is to find out from which devices Netflix accesses are made “in your name”, then you can figure out if these devices belong to us or to people we know or to someone who stole your account. Once that’s established, we’ll look at how to prevent unauthorized access to your Netflix account.
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Which devices are accessing your Netflix?
To find out which devices have logged in to Netflix using your account, from the streaming service’s Home page navigate to Account > Recent streaming activity by device. Here you’ll find a list of all accesses, with date and time, country, state, IP address from which the streaming was done and device used. Or you can go to Account > Settings > Manage Devices and see which devices are allowed to connect to Netflix with your account. They may not necessarily have, but they might. These two methods are also useful to you if you have an account with multiple profiles, and they show all the account activity together. On the other hand, if you want to see the activities of a single Netflix profile, then you’ll need to go to Account > Viewing Activities and you’ll find a list of the content that has been viewed by that profile. If something doesn’t add up, it’s likely that someone is stealing your Netflix.
How to prevent them from stealing your Netflix account
It may seem trivial to you, but the easiest way to get hold of a Netflix account’s data is by word of mouth: if you’ve shared it with a friend, he may have shared it with someone else, and so on. Keeping the sharing of your account to a minimum is the first step in preventing your Netflix account from being stolen. In other cases, however, your login and password are discovered by cyber criminals who manage, through a hacking attack, to breach Netflix servers and get hold of the data of hundreds of thousands of people in one go. In this case, unfortunately, you won’t be able to do anything about it.
How to protect your Netflix account
In any case, if you realize that someone has stolen your Netflix data, it is good to increase the security of the account. The first thing to do is to change the password by choosing a very strong one, perhaps produced by a password generator. Then you’d better log out of the account on all devices: this way, within 8 hours at most, all the devices that had access to your Netflix will no longer have it. Then you can grant it again only to the ones you want.