Protect your E-Mail account.

by Dawie Bezuidenhout Systems Engineer I.T.

This past weekend i had to help a friend that has lost control of his E-Mail account, this can be a serious issue and always needs to be dealt with in a quick manner.

In this post I will show you how to protect your email account from being hacked.?

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 being hacked.

If this is the case, then what is the reason for many people to lose control over 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 the answer.

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 the same as the 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 steal 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 resembles the original login page, people believe that it is true and give away their username and passwords by 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 passwords is by using a Keylogger. A Keylogger is nothing but a spyware. If you just access your email account from a computer installed with keylogger, you will definately lose your password. This is because the keylogger records each and every keystroke that you type.

Solution:

Protecting yourselves from a keylogger spyware 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 definately you are under the risk of losing your password.In fact many people lose their email accounts in cyber cafes. For the owner of the cyber cafe it's just a cakewalk to steal your password. For this he just needs 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 friends. I always use my own PC to login to my accounts to ensure safety.

Now this is very IMPORTANT, all this applies even more when you are using online banking facilities, using Paypal, Alertpay etc.

I hope this post is of some help and guidance to you, the thieves and scammers are always on the prawl, so be on the lookout.

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Created on Dec 31st 1969 18:00. Viewed 0 times.

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