Today I will teach you how to protect your email account from being hacked. Nowadays, I receive a lot of emails from people pleading her help after their email account is hacked. Now one question which arises in my mind is: ”Is it so easy to hack an email account? OR Is it so difficult to protect an email account from being hacked?” The answer to both of these questions is “Absolutely NOT!” It is neither easy to hack an email nor difficult to protect an email account from being hacked.
If this is the case, then why do so many people lose their accounts?
The answer is very simple. They don’t know how to protect themselves from being hacked! In fact most of the people who lose their email accounts are not the victims of hacking but the victims of Trapping. They lose their passwords not because they are hacked by expert hackers but because they are fooled to such an extent that they themselves give away their password.
Are you confused? If so, continue reading!
Now I’ll mention some of the most commonly used online scams which fool people into giving up their passwords. I’ll also cover how to protect your email account from these scams.
1. WEBSITE SPOOFING
Website spoofing is the act of creating a website with the intention of misleading readers. The website will be created by a different person or organization than the original website, especially for the purposes of cheating. Normally, the website will adopt the design of the target website and sometimes have a similar URL.
For example, a Spoofed Website of Yahoo.com looks exactly the same as Yahoo’s Regular Website. Most people believe that it is the original site and provide all the information a hacker needs. The main goal a of spoofed website is to fool users and take away their passwords. For this, spoofed sites offer fake login pages. These fake login pages resemble the original login pages of sites like Yahoo, Gmail, and Orkut. With such a strong resemblance, people believe it to be real and enter their usernames and passwords while trying to login to their accounts.
Solution:
- Never try to login/access your email account from a site other than the original.
- Always type the URL of the site in the address bar to get into there. Never click on the hyperlink to enter the site.
2. BY USING KEYLOGGERS
The other commonly used method to steal password is by using a Keylogger. A Keylogger is just spyware. A detailed description of keyloggers and their usage is discussed in the post “Hacking An Email Account.” If you read that post ,you’ll come to know that it is extremely easy to steal a password using a keylogger program.Keyloggers record each keystroke performed on a computer.
Solution:
Protecting yourselves from keylogger scam is very easy. Just install a good anti-spyware program and update it regularly. This keeps your PC secure from keyloggers. There is also a program called Anti-keylogger which is specially designed to detect and remove keyloggers. You can use this program to detect some stealth keyloggers which remain undetected by many anti-spyware programs.
3. ACCESSING YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT FROM CYBER CAFES
Do you access your email from cyber cafes? Then you are definitely at risk of losing your password. Many people lose their email accounts in cyber cafes. For the owner of the cyber cafe, it’s a cakewalk to steal your password. For this, they just need to install a keylogger onto the computers. Then when you login to your email account from one of the PCs, you give away your password to the cafe owner. There are also many Remote Administration Tools (RATs) which can be used to monitor your browsing activities in real time.
This doesn’t mean that you should never use cyber cafes for browsing the internet. Not all cyber cafe owners will be so wicked, but we recommend not using cafes for accessing confidential information. When it comes to security, never trust anyone, not even your friends. I always use my own PC to login to my accounts to ensure safety.
So with this I conclude my post and assume that I have helped my readers to protect their email accounts from being hacked. Please feel free to leave your comments.
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