Hacked Email Account: What to Do | Antivirus

                            Hacked Email Account

When your email account has been hacked, sensitive data can quickly fall into the wrong hands: cybercriminals have access to your online payment services, such as Paypal, they can make purchases for you, obtain confidential information about your business or even defraud other Internet users. The consequences can be serious. However, do not panic and apply our crisis advice: indeed, in the majority of cases, you can regain control of your account before anything serious happens.

How does the hacking of an email account work?

In short, the most important step in protecting your email account from hacking and abuse is prevention . This is why it is important to know how the hacking of an email account works, in order to protect yourself from it as well as possible. Cybercriminals use several methods to gain access to email addresses and passwords assigned to them. One particularly prevalent type of hacking involves attacking servers of important websites in order to steal user data. The phishing or malware attacks are more frequent attacks.

Data theft by server attack

The online attacks scale experienced by companies often make the headlines. In this way, criminals capture the login data of millions of customers. Since many users use the same password for several different sites, hackers who attack one website gain access to countless email accounts and websites. It is easy to guard against this problem by creating a unique and secure password for each registration . Since email account hacks are discovered when it is already too late, it is necessary to act quickly and change your passwords immediately.

Phishing via fraudulent emails

The second way to steal confidential data is phishing . This is a trap by which malicious software massively sends fake emails , tricking recipients into entering their personal login details on bogus sites. Most often, these fraudulent emails claim to come from original sites, and ask the recipient to provide his password for alleged security reasons. It is then redirected to a fake site, which looks like the original. Passwords entered there are not checked for their security, but immediately passed on to cybercriminals. The point is that serious websites, courier services, payment services, or online stores never ask their users for their passwords by email . It is therefore important to never communicate this data simply because it is requested from us. If in doubt about the authenticity of an email, please do not hesitate to contact the support of the website in question.

The malware attack

The third technique used by cybercriminals to harvest confidential data is malware attack . Most malware arrives in the form of spoof emails or bogus attachments: if these files are opened, malware is immediately installed on the recipient's computer - either spyware or malware. a subcategory of type keylogger ( keylogger ). These are programs that run silently in the background and capture sensitive data, especially passwords. the keyloggers log every keystroke made on the infected computer's keyboard, and transmit them to cybercriminals. antivirus. The best protection against these malicious software is to install a recent antivirus and an active firewall on your computer . But it is also everyone's responsibility to be careful: be wary of emails from strangers, and always check the authenticity of an email before opening its attachments.

What to do when your email account has been hacked

Do you think your email account has been hacked? First, you have to make sure: in this article, we offer you in detail all the tools to know if you are a victim of hacking. There is a simple way to do this: just enter your email address in the search engine of this web page , which compiles several hacked email addresses. If your email address appears in the results, follow our "crisis plan" step by step:

First try to log in to your account: if you can do it without problem, it means that your password has not yet been changed by hackers. You have to do it yourself as quickly as possible: go to your email settings and change the password . Choose a high security password (see below), which you will use exclusively for your messaging. If you use your old password on other websites, change them immediately as well, and choose a unique password for each site. You must then save your new email password on your other devices (Smartphone, tablet, etc.), otherwise your incoming emails will no longer arrive.

If your password has already been changed by hackers, you can still access your account through one or more confidential security questions, a service offered by most email providers. To do this, click on the “forgot password” button. Depending on the information you provided when registering, the service will ask you, for example, to enter your mother's maiden name, or that of your first pet. These are questions that are asked to the user when opening the account: the answers are recorded and in principle known only to him. Some services also offer to check whether access to the account is authorized through a mobile phone number or a second email address. If the answers are correct and you can confirm your verification contact, a new password will be emailed to you. In order to avoid any risk of hacking, do not keep it,

You should now investigate the cause of this infection and scan your entire system for the virus (s). The ideal is to use an emergency recovery disc or an online scanner. Recovery discs are available from most antivirus developers, . For the online scanner we recommend for example Bitdefender. This is important because if malware could crack the initial password and hack your email account, it can also access the one you just changed. If the scanner shows a result, you must therefore change the password again after removing the malware: this way you can be sure that the virus has not captured your password. If the scanner does not find malware on your computer, it is very possible that you have been the victim of email phishing or large-scale data theft in the past.

Once you have regained access to your mailbox and verified your system and changed your password, you still have to take stock. Research the history of the attack to better appreciate its scope and find evidence: Were spam emails sent on your behalf? Was your email address used to make online purchases? It is necessary to gather all the possible clues in case you need to prove the fraud urgently. If you or someone else (especially an online store) has suffered financial damage, it is recommended that you contact the police immediately and consult a lawyer if necessary.

Finally, you need to protect yourself for the future . Ideally, change all of your passwords. Indeed, if a keylogger has been installed on your computer, it is likely that it has captured other passwords. Since strong passwords are difficult to remember, you can use a password manager. These programs allow you to group and save your passwords, and remind you to change them at regular intervals. The best programs are presented in this article .

In addition, it is advisable to secure your most important accounts with dual factor identification. This is a double security system, which requires a password and an independent encrypted code for connection. Most often, this is often sent by SMS to the authorized person: only the password and the code authorize the device to connect to the user account. More and more email providers and websites are offering this two-factor identification during registration.