How accounts get hacked

When I first started using Internet, there was a lot of craze about hacking someone’s email account, I don’t know why but somehow it was considered a cool thing. Apart from people who wanted to hack, there were those also who got hacked (poor things).

This was a long time back and now I was under the impression that accounts do not get hacked any more (I still believe accounts do not get hacked atleast no lamer can hack them, cracking an account would be more appropriate term but I will use term hack only because of its wider ausage and acceptance). But recently some of my friends’ accounts (hotmail and facebook) got hacked. Its never a good thing when your account gets hacked so much information is stored on the account and not to mention all those emails you never wanted to delete. So when an account gets hacked its always a loss.

The question is why do accounts get hacked. Is hacking such an easy job that any one with basic programming knowledge or someone with a  hot-shot piece of software which claims to hack into any account can do it? The answer: Certainly not.

Hacking is not an easy job. And companies like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook etc have a very powerful system so i don’t believe that just about anyone can hack into their systems, so I think on most part its the end users fault that their account info gets into wrong hands. There are some very frequently used methods employed by the so called hackers.

I going to give list the most common methods here

1-Opening Spam Emails

One of the most common reason why accounts get hacked. These emails appear like those sent by some legitimate Company or Web service. These emails say you’ve got some private message or an ecard or a gift voucher (it can be anything really)  and in order to see the message etc you have to click on a link.

2- Emails with attachment

This is another commonly seen reason. I have my self received so many of these. One thing about them is that they are mostly from your contacts with some very convincing message…some thing like ‘hey this is very hilarious, do check it out’ and since the mail is from one of your contacts so you download the attachment.

3- Sharing files

Some times on IM softwares your contact may send some file to you (the contact is unaware many times that their chat software is sending out files or links to files) this is mostly because they have downloded some adware or spyware which is sending out all these links to who ever they are talking to.

4- Downloading malicious programs

When you are downloding anything off the internet you should be very careful what you are downloding and where you are downloading from. Only download from trusted and safe websites.

This post was just to point out some very common techniques (there are many more which I have not listed here) to get information from the the targeted victim. When you know what you are up against it becomes easy to protect your self and fight back! This post has already become very long, so I am going to write another one to tell you  simple steps you can take to avoid getting fooled.

Till then .. Stay Safe!

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