How to Prevent Your E-mail Account from Getting Hacked

With the advancement of technology today, we rely more and more on electronic devices, computers and the internet. Our emails are one of the most important features of the internet. It allows us to communicate across the globe for free and that is why it is the favorite targets for spammers and hackers.

The most important information needed to access your account is the username and password. Protect this information. Here some things you can do to protect your email accounts:

Be careful of what you post. Almost everything that is posted in the internet is available to everyone including spammers and hackers. Do not post your email address in public websites or forums. Spammers and Hackers scan the web space for email addresses to be put in their spam list. Once you are in their spam list, you get a lot of spam.

Never click any link in a spam mail. When you do, hackers can get valuable information from you and sometimes they can get access to your account. They do this through a process called phishing. Never under any circumstances should you click a link in a spam mail.

Use a virtual keyboard to Avoid Key loggers. Key loggers are malicious programs that log your keystrokes then send or store the information anywhere it is programmed to do. This is one of the ways hackers gain access to different kinds of accounts. When you go to a website, you type the address then type your username and password. You just gave the hacker your access codes! When using a computer you suspect to have a key logger, use a virtual keyboard so you use your mouse to type or you can use a key scrambler. You can get a virtual keyboard here.

Protect your computer from viruses. Viruses like key loggers are malicious software. The difference is not all viruses are key loggers and viruses spread. Get decent anti-virus software like AVG or Kaspersky. If you doubt your anti-virus protection you can do the one written above or you can try manually checking for viruses using the method written here: How to remove virus from an external device without an antivirus. The method was for flash drives but can be used on your hard drives. Be cautious however, do not delete SHR files in the root directory of your system drive i.e. IO.sys, ntldr, boot.ini, msdos.sys, pagefile.sys. There’s also a free virus removal kit from kaspersky.com.

When your account has already been compromised the only thing that you can do which is most effective of all is to change your password. This will stop any access hackers and spammers have in your account. After that, follow those methods suggested above so you’ll prevent your email from getting hacked.