A hacked email can cause lots of problems, and for good reason. Your shopping, social media, cloud storage, web hosting and tons of other personal info is out there and if someone manages to get into it, hackers can mess up your life quite a bit.
There are a number of ways your email can be hacked but probably the easiest way is to hack your cell phone. Cell phones are often the doorway for hacking attacks either through fake apps or even commercial spy apps.
Apps like mSpy are easily available and can allow anyone without hacking skills access to all your phone information including your email accounts. These apps are extremely powerful and easy to use.
This article will take a closer look at how hackers can use your email against you but you should be aware that all is not lost. If you know you have been hacked there are ways to remove hackers from your phone quite easily.
Worried about scammers hacking your email? Here are just a few things they can do.
Target Your Friends
Hackers can use your email to contact your friends, potentially scamming money out of them under the disguise of you. For instance, they’ll claim that you are in some kind of financial situation, be it a mugging, a car accident, or what have you, and that you need to send money by routing it to a certain bank account to do this. However, the money your friends send goes to the hacker, and it makes you look bad.
If they’re your trusted friend, however, they should know when something’s up. Their email to them will sound nothing like you, and they’ll call you to make sure. This can backfire in the hacker’s face, since you’re aware your account has been compromised.
They Can Erase Your Data
By grabbing hold of your email, they can access your Google account, your Facebook, your Twitter, your cloud storage and more, then they can erase everything you have on there. Even from your devices. Many devices are integrated with cloud storage, making it easy for a hacker to swipe everything.
They Can Destroy Your Personal Image
Besides asking your friends from money, they could use your social media accounts to broadcast hateful messages. But that’s not all. They can find personal photos of yourself and post them online. Take the now-defunct website IsAnyoneUp.com.
This site hosted revenge porn, which nude photos of a person that are posted online without the person’s consent, usually by a jealous ex or someone else seeking revenge. Many photos on the site were from hacked accounts. Thankfully the site is down, and the owner, Hunter Moore, is in serious trouble.
However, there are other sites like that out there. In a world where people send compromising photos to each other without thinking twice, it’s easy for them to be leaked. Our advice would be to keep such personal things to yourself or use messaging services that don’t allow the user to save.
Purchase Things
Many store websites keep payment information. It makes it convenient for returning customers who don’t want to type numbers every time they purchase. Amazon, the biggest outlet, does require you to reenter credit card information if you send it to another address, but many outlets don’t do this.
All it takes is a password reset, and then the person can do whatever to your account.
Snoop Into Your Conversations
By accessing your email, hackers can snoop into private conversations, whether it’s on Facebook, through email, or another service. Our advice would be to delete or encrypt all conversations you have, but not many people do that.
Overall
In many ways your email is a master key that a hacker can use to access your other accounts and any part of your digital life connected to that email can be accessed once the hacker is in. Hacking the phone itself can give them access to pretty much everything you use on that phone.
However, you can protect yourself. You can use temporary or disposable emails, or use multiple emails for different parts of the internet like having one for social, one for shopping or one for more personal things. Another thing you can do is to use two-step authentication, which will require input by you personally once you log in.
You should always keep your online security under review. Protecting your cell phone with a good antivirus app is a critical first step. Using strong passwords is another great way to protect yourself from hackers and scammers.
Unfortunately the technology we have come to rely on is also being used as a means to attack us. The secret is to stay ahead of would be hackers and find ways to keep your technology safe and secure.