So, there's been a lot of illicit gaining-of-access to people's Facebook accounts recently, the most recent one tonight's 'free makeup' scam. As such, there have been a lot of cries of 'hacker!' around the place.
It's not hacking, people. It's not hacking, either, when your husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend/friend gains access to your internet account because a) you left yourself logged in or b) they know your password.
Hacking is when someone reconfigures/reprograms a system/website etc without the permission of the owner - and often they do this to illicitly gain access to accounts or other information. Sometimes it might be taking advantage of a pre-existing weakness in the system, or it might be because they're super-smart and can just figure out how to get through it.
If you think of it in terms of breaking into a house, hacking is like when someone breaks a window to get in to your house, or destroys the lock on a door.
The people who are gaining access to your Facebook accounts - for instance, you friends - are more like nicking the key you left somewhere carelessly, and letting themselves in the front door - or you leaving your front door unlocked. In the instance of viruses or similar (where you may have unwittingly clicked on something that has then accessed your passwords etc), it's perhaps like someone making a copy of your key and again, letting themselves in your front door. They haven't actually made any changes to the program or system or breached any security measures put in place by Facebook programmers.
If Facebook accounts did indeed get hacked, changing your password would only be a temporary fix - the hackers could just use the same weakness in Facebook's structure to get back in (your changed password would just make the process a bit longer for them). Facebook programmers would have to make some changes to the website and fix the security surrounding it, because obviously there are some weaknesses that people have been able to take advantage of. And all the tech blogs would have a field day.
If, however, you have just fallen prey to a scam and unwittingly handed your password over to someone (perhaps by clicking on a scam web link or downloading a virus), or your significant other/sibling/roommate knows your password, then changing your password will indeed fix the problem.... but they aren't hackers :)
