Today in this post
I’ll teach you how to protect your email
account from being hacked. Nowadays I get a lot of emails where
most of the people say “My Email account is hacked please help…”. Now one
question which arises in our 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 single answer to
these two questions is “Absolutely NOT!”. It is neither easy to hack an email
nor difficult to protect an email account from bieng hacked.
If this is the case, then what is the reason
for many people to 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 some expert hackers
but they are fooled to such an extent that they themselves give away their
password.
Are you confused? If
so continue reading and you’ll come to know…
Now I’ll mention some
of the most commonly used online scams which fool people and make them lose
their passwords. I’ll also mention 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
the readers. The website will be created by a different person or organisation
(Other than the original) especially for the purposes of cheating. Normally,
the website will adopt the design of the target website and sometimes has a
similar URL.
For example a Spoofed
Website of Yahoo.com appears
exactly same as Yahoo
Website. So most of the people believe that it is the original
site and lose their passwords. The main intention of spoofed websites is to
fool users and take away their passwords. For this,the spoofed sites
offer fake login
pages. These fake
login pages resemble the original login pages of sites
like Yahoo,Gmail,Orkut etc. Since it resemble’s the original login page people beleive that it is true and give
away their username
and passwordsby trying to login to their accounts.
Solution:
§ Never try to login/access your email account
from the sites other than the original site.
§ Always type the URL of the site in the address
bar to get into the site. 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 nothing but a spyware. The detailed description of keylogger and it’s usage
is discussed in the post Hacking
an email account. If you read this post you’ll come to know
that it is too easy to steal the password using a keylogger program. If you
just access your email account
from a computer installed with keylogger, you definitely lose your password.
This is because the keylogger records each and every keystroke that you type.
Solution:
Protecting yourselves
from a keylogger scam is very easy.Just install a good anti-spyware program and update it regularly. This
keeps your PC secure from a keylogger. Also there is 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 definitely you are under the risk of loosing
your password.In fact many people lose their email account in cyber cafes. For
the owner of the cyber cafe it’s just a cakewalk to steal your password. For
this he just need’s to install
a keylogger on his computers. So when you login to your email account from this
PC, you give away your password to the cafe owner. Also there are 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. I know, not all the cyber cafe owners will be
so wicked but it is recommended not to use cafes for accessing confidential
information. If it comes to the matter of security never trust anyone, not even
your friend. 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 pass your comments…
