How to prevent your email account to be 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 loose 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 loose their email accounts are not the victims of hacking but the victims of Trapping. They loose 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 loose 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 loose 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 pagesresemble 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 theirusername 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 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 loose 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 loose 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…

How to hack a orkut account?

Google uses a 4 Level Orkut login which makes it difficult to hack Orkut using brute force attack.

First Level - Security-SSL or 128 bit secured connection

Second Level – Google account checks for cookie in the sytem of user

Third Level – Google provides a redirection to the entered User information

Fourth Level – Google doesn’t use conventional php/aspx/asp coding. So it is impossible to hack Orkut using input validation attack!!!

It is not an easy task to hack Orkut by breaking this security! But still some people manages to get access to other’s Orkut accounts. The question concerned is How they do it? Many of them just use simple tricks that fool users and then they themself leak out their password. Here are some points you need to take care of, to protect your Orkut account being hacked.

Common Ways to Hack Orkut

1. Using Keyloggers is one of the Easiest Way to Hack an Orkut (or any other email) password. Keylogger programs can spy on what the user types from the keyboard. If you think that you can just uninstall such programs, you are wrong as they are completely hidden.

A keylogger, sometimes called a keystroke logger, key logger, or system monitor, is a hardware device or small program that monitors each keystroke a user types on a specific computer’s keyboard. Keylogger is the easiest way to hack an Orkut account.

A keylogger program is widely available on the internet. Some of the best ones are listed below

Win-Spy Monitor

Realtime Spy

A detailed information on Keylogger Hack can be found in my post Hacking an Email Account.

2. Phishing Attack is the most popular way of hacking/stealing other’s password. By using fake login pages it is possible to hack Orkut. Here the users land on a page where they are asked for their login information and they enter their Orkut username and password thinking it to be a real page but actually it is other way round. It submits all the entered details to the creator of the fake login page.

3. Orkut New Features: I have come across a page(fake page) that looks like they are giving the user a choice of selecting new features for orkut with your ID and password, of course!! When the user submit’s his/her Orkut login information through this page, there goes his ID and password mailed to the coder.

4. Community Links: Many times you are provided with a link to a community in a scrap. Read the link carefully, It may be something like http://www.okrut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=22910233 OKRUT not ORKUT. This is definitely a trap created by the hacker to hack your Orkut password. Clicking on this link will take you to a fake login page and there you loose up your password.

5. Java script: You must have seen the circulating scraps that asks you to paste this code in your address bar and see what happens! Well sometimes they also leak out your information. Check the code and if you are unsure of what to do, then I recommend not to use it. So be careful, javascripts can even be used to hack Orkut!

6. Primary mail address: If by some means a hacker came to know the password of your Yahoo mail or Gmail, which users normally keeps as their primary mail address in their Orkut account, then hacker can hack Orkut account by simply using USER ID and clicking on ‘forget password’. This way Google will send link to the already hacked primary email ID to change the password of the Orkut account. Hence the email hacker will change your Orkut account’s password. Hence your, Orkut account is hacked too.

So a better thing would be to keep a very unknown or useless email ID of yours as primary email id so that if the hacker clicks on ‘Forgot password’ the password changing link goes to an unknown email id i.e. not known to the hacker. Hence your Orkut account saved.

So, I hope that this post not only teaches you to hack Orkut but also to hack protect your Orkut account.

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