Over the past week and presently the popular free email services / providers were targeted in one of the largest attacks in the past few years. Attackers have been using phishing schemes as well as brute force attacks to gain access to tons of unsuspecting account holders.
How to increase the chances you wont fall victim? Well firstly ALWAYS check the address bar when you are logging into ANY website. One of the most common ways accounts are compromised today are by logging into a fake mirror site that looks identical to the site you thought you were logging into. You enter your credentials and it sends it right to the attackers, who will use the account for a number of illegal activities. Usually spamming for email cases. This will get your account locked permanently or even deleted.
However this will only reduce the chances.. The attackers also use another method called brute force attacks. By this method they gain access to accounts with weak passwords. By this I mean passwords that consist of a word in the dictionary, a name, no letter – number combination, etc.
Good practice for passwords is as follows:
“Passwords Should…
· be at least eight characters long. (The most secure passwords are 8 to 14 characters long.)
· contain characters from three groups: Letters, Numerals and Symbols .
· have at least one symbol in the second through sixth positions.
Passwords Should NOT…
· contain personal information such as your name, username, a child’s name, or date of birth
· a prior password
· be a word found in the dictionary
· be repeated characters (”aaabbbccc”), keyboard or alphabetic sequences (”qwerty”, “abcdef”), or acronyms
To protect your password…
· Never write down your password
· Never share your password with anyone
· Never use your network logon password for another purpose (use different passwords for e-mail and other purposes)
· Change your password every 60 -90 days or immediately if you think it has been compromised. ”
-BMT Corp
Gmail has a great feature at the bottom of the page after you log in. You will see “Last account activity: xx minutes ago at IP x.x.x.x. Details”. Click on Details and you can see information like when your account was recently accessed, what IP address it was accessed from, what method (client, web, etc) it was accessed, what web browser, etc. This is very helpful in identifying if someone has accessed your account other than you.
It is also good practice to use an email client such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird among others so that your email is downloaded and stored locally on your PC. This way if you lose your account due to one of the explained methods, you will still have your contacts, emails, attachments, etc which you can migrate to your new email account.
So please use this advice to help protect you from situations like these. To some people email is a critical part of their life.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Be the first to start a conversation