This is a no-brainer, but the reason you hear it all the time is that many people still don’t do it. If you’re using a third-party service, you may not be able to completely prevent email hacks, but there are a lot of things you can do to minimize the risk (and minimize the damage if your account is compromised somehow). How to Secure Your Email as an Individual Keyloggers can also be installed and operated remotely, but this is more technically difficult and generally would require tricking you into downloading some malware. While constructing a sophisticated phishing operation requires time and technical skill, virtually anyone with a few minutes to read a tutorial or two and download some software could try brute-forcing your account or installing a keylogger on your machine, especially if they have physical access to it. The second and third types of hacks are significantly easier. That said, your data could still be compromised if the email service you use gets hacked and user data is posted online or sold en masse. Unless you’re famously wealthy or your email is full of tantalizing secrets hackers would know about, it’s unlikely that you would be targeted specifically by this type of hack. In fact, a bunch of major mail services had millions of their customers hacked earlier this year, although it’s not clear whether the hacker took advantage of systemic flaws or used some other approach to get in.īut the relatively good news is that because hacking into a system by finding and capitalizing on a security flaw is time-consuming, difficult and risky, the chances of an “average Joe” (or even an average Joe company) being the main target of such an attack are relatively slim. That’s not to say that it doesn’t, of course. These services are massive, and because hackers are trying to crack into them all the time, Google employs hundreds of people to ensure that that doesn’t happen. Unless you’re using a privately-constructed email server (in which case only you know how secure your system might be), chances are you’re using a publicly-available email service like Gmail. The first type of hack-finding and exploiting a flaw in your email system-is possible, but difficult. One common approach is to get the user to install a keylogger, which then silently records every keystroke they make, allowing the hacker to search the records for the user’s email login, which will typically be immediately followed by their password.
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