Derrick
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- Nov 22, 2010
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I recently received spam from known contacts. The spam was sent to all the contacts of the respective senders both from Google Mail. This made me very concerned as to the security of my own and other people’s web based mail accounts and as a little bit of researched proved, hijacking of web based email accounts are not all that rare.
I did a little informal poll on the MyBroadband.co.za forums and at the time of writing this blog post the stats to the question “Has your webmail account ever been hacked?” reflected 6.67% to the affirmative, 80% to the negative and 13.33% were unsure.
The mere fact that there was a couple of yes and unsure answers is cause for concern. The question is, what can you do to make your web based email account as secure as possible in order to prevent events like account hijacking?
There are two main actions you need to take. You need to secure your password and make sure the secondary email where any lost passwords are sent is an address you entered and not one a cracker of some unknown origin added for his own purposes.
A secure password is one that is extremely tough to crack with brute force. There are online resources including those on some of the web based email services that will help you find a strong password. Strong passwords tend to have a mix of numbers and letters including capitalization.
Microsoft offers this utility to help you find a strong password:
http://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/password/checker.mspx
Use it and get yourself a password that is as strong as possible.
Next go into the settings of your web based email service provider. Whether it is Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Gmail or any other, make sure your secondary email address hasn’t been compromised.
If you want to be extra safe, change your password from time to time.
In fact, having seen what I saw recently, I changed my password and made it stronger. Change is as good as a holiday some folks say. In the world of online security a password change can only be good for you!
Technorati : gmail hotmail webmail yahoo mail online web based email security hijacking
I did a little informal poll on the MyBroadband.co.za forums and at the time of writing this blog post the stats to the question “Has your webmail account ever been hacked?” reflected 6.67% to the affirmative, 80% to the negative and 13.33% were unsure.
The mere fact that there was a couple of yes and unsure answers is cause for concern. The question is, what can you do to make your web based email account as secure as possible in order to prevent events like account hijacking?
There are two main actions you need to take. You need to secure your password and make sure the secondary email where any lost passwords are sent is an address you entered and not one a cracker of some unknown origin added for his own purposes.
A secure password is one that is extremely tough to crack with brute force. There are online resources including those on some of the web based email services that will help you find a strong password. Strong passwords tend to have a mix of numbers and letters including capitalization.
Microsoft offers this utility to help you find a strong password:
http://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/password/checker.mspx
Use it and get yourself a password that is as strong as possible.
Next go into the settings of your web based email service provider. Whether it is Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Gmail or any other, make sure your secondary email address hasn’t been compromised.
If you want to be extra safe, change your password from time to time.
In fact, having seen what I saw recently, I changed my password and made it stronger. Change is as good as a holiday some folks say. In the world of online security a password change can only be good for you!
Technorati : gmail hotmail webmail yahoo mail online web based email security hijacking