How to Check if Your Yahoo or Gmail Email Account was Hacked? We are very much aware of email hacking these days. Hackers stealing email passwords, getting into mailboxes, zooming in and stealing important information. It is not just the spam email we have to watch for. This could be quite risky if you are the victim, because by doing so, the hackers can find out lots of personal information about you, your family, financial or career related information that you have probably shared with your near, dear or trusted ones through email, and you have no intention to share it with an unknown person that you don’t trust. Sometimes it is also the case that your email was not hacked but you feel like it, because you experience some strange behavior of the system like – you can’t find an old email or you see an email “marked as read” that you never read! Well, if you want to do a little investigation to find out if someone hacked your email, you can do that now in Gmail or Yahoo mail. You are probably aware by now that we all use a unique IP address when we connect to the internet.
These IP addresses are now country specific, meaning if you live in Australia, your IP address will have a different numbering scheme than someone living in England. Therefore, if someone has hacked your Gmail account sitting in another country, you will be able to find that out easily. Hacked Gmail Accounts PastebinHere are the steps should you take to reduce the chances of your Gmail account being hacked. Forgot your Gmail username or password? Did someone hack your Google account and change the password or the secret question? Or you do not have access to your. Get your account back without contacting your account provider. The absolute first thing you should do if your Gmail account is hacked is check to see if you can still log into it. This may seem like a wasted step, but you’d be. If the hacker is doing his job sitting in the same country, still you might be able to trace it with few additional steps stated below. How to See if Your Yahoo Email Account Has Been Hacked. Login to yahoo mail and on the top left corner of your screen you will see your profile name. Click on the little triangular menu pointer right next to your profile name and select the option “account Info”. Here you will be asked to enter your password. After entering password you will come to the next screen where there is several account related information that you can change or modify. Here you will see “sign- in and security” section and under that section you will see “view your recent sign- in activity”. Click on that option and another screen as shown in image 3 will launch giving you all the details of the account activity of the last few days. Here on this screen you can see the events and also the IP addresses that were used to log into your account. There are lot more information you will see on this screen that I have truncated in the above image to make the texts clearly visible. These IP addresses are actually the addresses that were used while logging into this email account at different times. Since the IP address we use keeps changing with time, we see so many of them listed here. But all these addresses should definitely belong to you and your ISP. If you can identify one of these addresses are not yours, then you know there was an intruder. Let’s try with the location first. On the IP address option tab as shown by the arrow key in the above image, change it to “location” by clicking on the downwards triangle. All the IP addresses will be changed to their corresponding location – country. This will give you the idea if all those locations are appropriate in terms of how you logged in to your account. For example, if you didn’t leave Australia for the last few days, then all these locations should be marked as “Australia”. But if you have left for the weekend and went to another country and logged in to your account from there, then for those corresponding days location will be different. Based on this logic, if you never left Australia and you see one instance there that says “China” for example, you know something is wrong. If you cannot detect any wrong doing from the location information and still you are not convinced, switch the location option back to “IP Address”. Check the 2nd number from the left “2. Check if this number is the same in all the IP addresses in the list. If you see there is one address for which this number is different, more likely you have come close to catching the intruder. Note down this IP address you have identified (like 3xx. Go to this web site В В http: //whatismyipaddress. IP address box as shown in the image 4 below. Enter the IP address in the box and hit “lookup IP Address”. This will give you the information on which ISP this IP address is registered with. If your ISP is different than the name of the ISP that will come out from this lookup trace, then you have found the host ISP the hacker belongs to. Now you know what to do! Or just contact that ISP for more information on the person who entered into your email account. How To See if Your Gmail Account Has Been Hacked. Just login to Gmail and towards the bottom of your screen (the first screen after you login to Gmail), you will see an option called “details” as shown in image 5 below. This will launch almost a same type of pop up screen as we have seen for Yahoo with IP address list and location table. You just have to follow the same check and trace principle as we have illustrated above. This account activity will pop up. You can also visit this link https: //security. В to see who has accessed your entire Google account. It is also worth mentioning here that, to protect your email from getting hacked, it is always better to change passwords frequently and use passwords that are difficult to break. You can protect your accounts using multi layer security. In addition, when you enter password, system will often ask if you want to save the password for next time you login so that you don’t have to type it in again. It is always better not to go for that option and save your password; this will make the job lot easier for the Hacker. What To Do If Your Gmail Account Gets Hacked. The absolute first thing you should do if your Gmail account is hacked is check to see if you can still log into it. This may seem like a wasted step, but you’d be surprised how many hackers neglect to change the original password right away. If you can log in, immediately change your password and check that your secondary email/secret question/mobile phone number have not been changed. In Gmail, go to: Settings –> Accounts and Imports –> Google Account Settings. From there, look under personal settings; you can change your password, as well as your password recovery options. You should change everything. If you are unable to log in, go to: https: //www. Fast thinking and fast acting is your best bet for getting through this situation unscathed. However, you may not have been alerted to the problem until it was already too late. If the hacker has already changed your secondary address and/or your secret question you will have to start dealing with Google directly and prepare to fill out a form. If you can’t remember your secret question& answer, or it has been changed, go to this page: https: //www. No” indicating that you were unable to regain access to your account using the above methods. The form is relatively short and straightforward and will allow Google to establish that you are the correct and true owner of the account, and also pinpoint the exact time the account was taken over. Unfortunately, this is the extent of your legitimate options. It’s now a waiting game, which is often the most frustrating part of identify theft. If you don’t already have a secondary email address, now is probably a good time to set one up. If your Gmail password was the same as any of your others (which is a bad idea) – online banking, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Google is working on the old one. Send an email to friends/family/business contacts associated with your Gmail address and warn them that your account was hacked and that they should ignore suspicions communications from it until further notice. Post a similar message to any social networking sites you belong to. Once the situation is resolved, and you are once again in possession of your account, repeat the steps above and log into your security settings. Check absolutely everything – including what name and address your mail is sent as. A brief overview of what you should be checking on: Account Security: Settings –> Accounts and Import –> Google Account Settings –> Change Password [change your password]Settings –> Accounts and Import –> Google Account Settings –> Change Password Recovery Options [verify every security measure, then change them]Spam: Settings –> General - > Signature [double check nothing has changed]Settings –> General - > Vacation Responder [be sure it hasn't been turned on]Hijacking: Settings –> Accounts and Import –> Send Mail As [make sure this is your correct address]Settings –> Filters [you don't want filters that delete mail]Settings –> Forwarding and POP/IMAP –> Forwarding [disabled or whatever address you assigned]Settings –> Forwarding and POP/IMAP –> POP Download [disabled]Settings –> Forwarding and POP/IMAP –> IMAP Access [disabled]To achieve total Gmail security, you should never use the same password from another site. It is recommended that you change your password on a bi- monthly basis. Gmail also has a new feature that monitors the activity in your account. From your inbox, scroll down to the bottom, just below where your account storage is displayed. It now says “Last account activity” and a time, as well as an IP address (hopefully yours). If you click on the “details” button you will see all recent account activity, including IP addresses and methods of entry – browsers, POP3, etc. Now, the nifty part: if another user logs into your account while you’re in it, that status will change, and announce that another user is logged into the account, and display their IP address. Now you’ve got the power to potentially catch a hacker before your account is messed with. Now repeat our first step – change your password immediately. Not a foolproof system, but in this world of account hijacking, every little bit helps.
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March 2019
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