How to Hack Email Accounts?
By Prempal Singh
Information Technology plays great role now a days. Advancement in technology has brought us on a phase where we all are dependent on internet and using palmtop computers, smart phones, laptops, online banking and facilities, online form submission.
Paper work is almost about to vanish from our daily life and online documents is being used instead.
Emails (electronic mails) has replaced posts, letters and all. Emails are being used by everyone like business, individual person, banking sector etc for sending payment information, sending invoices, sending applications and even for verification purpose too.
So the main question is “Do you think that your email account is secure and can not be compromised?”
Well it totally depends on awareness you have about the threats and security precautions. Email accounts can be hacked just by a silly mistake done by it’s user.
If you search on internet then there are many software, how to hack email account and most of people think that accounts can be hacked with software but its wrong. There are no such software to hack email account.
Today I want to share some techniques that what ways are to hack email accounts:
- Social Engineering Techniques
- Phishing Attacks
- Cookie Hijacking
- By Key-loggers
Social Engineering Techniques:
This technique is define to using attackers mind, not the software/tools or any type of tricks. Social Engineering is vast way to hack any email accounts at that time. This technique is not related with networking security issues, exploits and such vulnerabilities. It is related to simple attacker mind or we can say psychological tricks. Smart Attacker use this technique to get access, victim’s email account. This technique is surely work but require patience. Because there are no limit of time to perform this attack.
There are many ways to attack Social Engineering like creating a critical situations, gathering and using information(pictures, videos) by much social networking sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace), Get a job there and conversation with victim to observe behavior and personal information.
Social Engineering technique is most common during the chat session. And these type of information are use to guess or reset the password of victim’s account.
The vital part of this attack to win trust of victim.
Phishing Attack
Phishing attack technique is very old and effective technique to get victim’s sensitive information. Phishing is highly rated threat which can lead you to lose your email account as well as bank accounts too. Attackers send email by pretending to be a reputed source and asks for your information by serving you a fake web page.
Phishing is done by email spoofing or instant messaging. Survey by Wikipedia, attacks of phishing increasing day by day. The following graph shows phishing attack, 2011 to 2015. According to Wikipedia, still march 2016, number of attacks are 1,85,988.
Data Source : Wikipedia
Here are some major phishing attacks
- March-2011
Victim – RSA Security
To break into US Defense suppliers, attacker phished successfully into internal RSA Staff and get all master keys for all RSA secure ID and security tokens.
Source: blog.rsa.com and nytimes.com
- November-2013
Victim – Target (Stores)
Personal information like credit card details stolen of 110 million users with the help of phished subcontractor account. And then IT security staff and CEO afterwards fired.
Source: bringmethenews.com and 247wallst.com
- September-2014
Victim – Home Depot
100+million customers personal and credit card information of all 2200 Home Depot stores are posted on hacking websites for sale.
Source: usatoday.com
- November-2014
Victim – ICANN
ICANN is stands for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers which is private non profit organization american company. Attackers access to CZDS (Centralized zone Data System) and gained about all users informations ( Real Names, Contact Information) and then selted to hashes for password
Source: icann.org
Cookie Hijacking
In cookie hijacking attacker can hack email accounts simply. This trick is very dangerous because whenever consumer change a any setting of email account like password then there will no need to attacker for again access or hack Email account of victim. And it might take you to inbox of victim’s email account without asking for any security password of victim account.
Key-loggers
The first key-logger is written by Perry Kivolowitz on November 17, 1983. Keylogger is a software program or hardware device that can be used to monitor and log each of the keys, user types into a computer keyboard. The attacker who has installed this program or hardware device is able to view all secrets key.
More About key-logger
So there are some techniques of hack email accounts. For safety tips of email accounts you can check Email Security Tips