Email Protection..

To Find Unauthorized Activity On Your Email Account

           Do you suspect that your email account is under attack? Do you want to maintain total security of your email account and make it 100% hack proof? Well, Some times our email account might have got hacked and we may not be aware of that. We may believe that our email account is safe, but in reality our private and confidential information may be falling into the hands of a third person.

Some signs of  unauthorized activity on an email account.

1. Your new emails are marked as Read even if you’ve not read them.
2. Your emails are moved to Trash or even permanently deleted without your notice.
3. Your emails are being forwarded to a third party email address (check your settings ->forwarding).
4. Your secondary email address is changed.

If you come across any of the above activities on your email account, then it is a clear indication that your email account is hacked.

Security Features in Gmail 

          Gmail provides an additional security feature to protect your email account through the means of IP address logging. That is, Gmail records your IP address every time you login to your Gmail account. So, if a third party gets access to your account then even his/her IP is also recorded. To see a list of recorded IP address, scroll down to the bottom of your Gmail account and you’ll see something like this.

Gmail - Last account activity

      You can see from the above figure that Gmail shows the IP address of last login (last account activity). You can click on Details to see the IP address of your last 5 activities. If you find that the IP listed in the logs doesn’t belong to you, then you can suspect unauthorized activity.

Steps to be carried out to stop unauthorized activity on your email account

       If you feel/suspect that your account is hacked then you must immediately take the actions mentioned below

1. Change your Password
2. Change your security question.
3. Remove any third party email address (if any) to which your account is set to forward emails.
4. Make sure that you can access the email account of your secondary email address.
5. Also change you secondary email password and security question

       This ensures that your account is safe from future attacks. But I strongly recommend that you read the following post to protect your email account from being hacked.

How To Protect An Email Account From Being Hacked 

        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 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 Key-loggers

         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 account from cyber cafe's.

          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.

Thanks for reading my post if it's useful please post comments.