Help For Hacking Victims

What To Do If Your Email Is Hacked

Email hacking is a big, and seemingly growing, activity and over the past year numerous San Miguel residents have had their email accounts attacked and their address books stolen. Once in possession of the victim’s email contacts, the hackers then send messages, which appear to come from the victim, to the stolen email addresses claiming that the victim is in serious trouble and asking for money or other forms of assistance from the addressee.

Frequently the hacker messages are so poorly written and phrased that the addressees recognize them as scams and immediately notify the victim that he/she has been hacked. However, some messages are sophisticated and enough people fall for the appeals to make sending them worthwhile for the hacker.

Other hackers mine the victims emails for private information such as passwords (such as might have been sent to the victim by an Online vendor who had forgotten his/her password) and other valuable data.

So, what do you do if your account is hacked? Below are some suggestions we found on the Internet.

Most of the websites we viewed emphasized that the most important thing is to take action right away and that the first thing you need to do is to change your email password immediately – before the clever hacker has a chance to do it for you and, thus, lock you out of your account. If you find the steps below difficult to follow, ask for help from a trusted computer professional.

According to the website “The Internet Privacy Guide << http://www.theinternetprivacyguide.com/what-to-do-when-your-email-is-hacked >> these are the steps you should take.

Change your password: In order to stop any further damage from getting done, CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD! Your email account was most likely hacked due to a weak password. This time it’s critical you make sure it’s a stronger password.

Change the password on any other accounts that use the same password: Everyone is guilty of using the same password sometimes on another site. If by chance you use the same password for any of your other accounts (i.e. Facebook), also change those passwords immediately. Whether your account was hacked by a human or hacked by a computer, they are most likely going to try and access other sites with the information they now know, which is your email address and your password.

Search your email for other leaked passwords: Do a search across your email on the word ‘password’. There is a high probability the attacker has already done this and recorded the passwords in these emails. Ensure again these accounts are all changed.

Check your ‘Sent’ folder and ‘Trash’ folder: To help you understand if the attacker spammed your friends or tried to reset other passwords, check your ‘Sent’ folder and ‘Trash’ folder for clues.

Review your email accounts settings: Depending on your email provider, the attacker may have edited your account settings to do one of the following

* Auto forward all email to another account. Verify this isn’t happening
* Change the ‘sent from” email address on your account so that all email is now not sent from a spammy one.
* Your ‘footer’ and ‘vacation responder’ notifications haven’t been modified.

Check your old email addresses: A lot of times it’s a friend’s old hotmail or yahoo address that has been targeted that they forgot about. If you haven’t visited your old email account in awhile, go back and log on to these sites and do one of the following

* Update the password on your old email and make it strong.
* Delete your old account

Complicate Your Password Reset Security Questions: Often hackers get access to your old password reset questions / answers, so I’d highly recommend changing them.These steps will help prevent an attacker from accessing your old email accounts and also gaining access to your personal email and personal contact list.

Spread the word about strong passwords

In addition to the above, we found the following recommendation from Yahoo. Create a separate email account, one that is never given out, and adjust the settings of your main email account to forward every email message to your new email account.  This way, if your account is phished/hacked you will at least have a backup of all of your emails and information.

There are many more recommendations out there on the Internet. A search on the words, << What to do if you email account is hacked >> will bring them up. Also, if you have any other tips, please do not hesitate to click on the balloon in the upper right hand corner of this message to add them