With the increasing vulnerabilities in the online world, it has become imperative to take various measures to protect email from hackers. As emails are an important part of your corporate life, many hackers target to hack your email. Once they succeed in hacking, they can execute various unethical activities under your identity. For this reason, as a popular phase says “Prevention is better than cure” you must take several steps to protect email from hackers.
In this article, we will discuss several methods to protect email from hackers. Also, we will illustrate the steps to retrieve the access to your email after it gets hacked.
Methods to protect your email
Listed here are some methods to ensure the high level of security in your email.
Setting a strong password
Whenever you sign up an email account on any platform, it is recommended to create a strong password. A strong password is the one that cannot be guessed by anyone; not even your closest friends. To set a strong password, you may follow several tips.
Firstly, the password must not relate to your basic identities, such as your name or birthday. Instead, it should be anonymous and difficult to track so that no one can guess it easily. Secondly, it should involve the use of alphabets and numbers. More importantly, your password must be a mixture of alphabets in upper case, lower case and numbers.
For example, if you regularly like exercising, you can set the password “il2eraGYM”. This might be looking quite difficult at first, but here is the crack. The password is the first letters of the word in the sentence “I like to exercise regularly at gym”; with “to” written as “2” and “gym” in upper case
Enabling Two-factor authentication
A majority of platforms offer two-factor authentication system, where you need to verify your sign in by entering the OTP (one-time password) sent on your phone. This allows you to ensure high level of protection, as anyone would require the OTP to access your email on an unauthorized device. In fact, access would not be granted if they do not enter the auto-generated OTP, sent on your registered mobile number, in the authorized box.
For example, if you are trying to sign in from an unauthorized desktop, after entering the username and password, you will receive a message containing the OTP. You have to enter the exact OTP to add the desktop browser as an authorized platform.
Things to do after your email gets hacked
There are several things that you need to do if you find that your email account has been hacked by someone. As taking appropriate actions timely is of utmost importance, you must know the steps of retrieving the access to your mail.
Changing your password
As soon as you detect that your account is being used by someone else who has hacked your account, the first step must be to change the password. It should be noted that most of the hackers change the password after gaining the access. If you’re lucky enough to access the account before its password is changed, you must create a new password.
For changing the password, you should navigate to the Accounts and Imports window from the Mail Settings page of your Gmail account. Here, you should find the Change Password tab and create a new password. It is recommendable that the new password must not relate to your old password, as it can create a scope for the hacker to gain the access again. For this reason, you should set a strong password and must not disclose it to anyone.
Reclaiming your account
If the hacker changes your account password after hacking your account, you will be locked out of the email account. In this case, you will have to retrieve your email the harder way. For this, you must enter your username and click on the “Forgot your password” option. On the next screen, you will have to answer the security question so that the reset password link can be sent to your recovery email address.
Once the link is sent, you can log into your recovery email and click on the reset link to set a new password.
Checking the settings
After changing your password, you prevent the hacker from accessing your site. But his activities may still harm you if he modified the settings while your account was hacked. For this reason, you would need to check the settings.
Hence, you should visit the Mail Settings page and check if the signature involves any malicious content. Apart from this, the hacker might have changed the settings to receive a copy of your inbox. To ensure the safety, you must check the mail forwarding section and make sure that an unexpected address has not been added.
Apologizing for the inconvenience caused
When your account was under the control of the hacker, he might have sent malicious emails to your recipient list. For this reason, you must be humble and send an apology mail requesting forgiveness for the inconvenience caused and stated that your account was hacked.
