Recognizing, Beating, And Preventing Hijacked Email Addresses
Zombie PCs And Hijacked Email Accounts
The fight against spam is a long and drawn out one. In most cases it means the prevention of spammers sending unsolicited and unwanted emails to your address, or at least the filtering out of this email once they do send it. It may also mean the attempt to prevent spammers from leaving marketing comments on your blog or forum. In some cases spam emails are sent from what are known as zombie PCs. A zombie PC is one that has been taken over by an item of automated software or an application that uses the existing email client and account on that PC to forward large numbers of these emails.
Are Webmail Accounts Any More Secure?
As well as the fear of being infected by a virus or spyware that uses your computer to forward these emails it is also possible that hackers can hijack your webmail accounts to the same end. However, it happens, a hijacked account can lead to a number of very serious problems. Whether you predominantly use your email for personal or business use there is undoubtedly some information in your email program (online or on your desktop) that should not be forwarded to third parties or to other people in your address book.
Hackers Sending Spam From Your Email
Hijacked accounts can be used to send spam email. Your email address will be the one that people see when they open the email and because it has your address (somebody that the recipient knows and, to an extent, trusts) they are more likely to open attachments and click the links found within the email. If you use your email for business purposes this could easily lose respect within your working environment or with customers. With a personal account it could cause problems with personal relationships. When an email account is hijacked it is common for the first people to receive emails to be those within your contact book and those that have sent you email.
Protecting Yourself Against The Possibility Of Being Hijacked
Recognizing that your account has been hijacked is the first step to recovery, but the act of prevention or minimizing the potential problems that would occur is good practice for all email users. When a webmail account is hijacked it is typical that the genuine user will lose access to their account because the hacker will change the password on the account. Regularly backing up your recent emails or, at the very least, your contact address book can prevent the loss of important data and it will enable you to warn everybody within the address book what has happened and that they should ignore any future emails from that address.
Returned Email Messages
Receiving a lot of returned email messages and not recognizing the original message as being sent from your machine does not necessarily mean you have been hijacked. In fact, it is more likely that somebody within your address book has been hijacked instead. The hijacker will attempt to prevent a zombie computer owner from finding out they have been hijacked in order that they continue to use the computer. However, they will still use a fake email address as the reply to address in the email. This further prevents the computer owner from finding out.
Attempting To Regain Access To Your Account
If access to your account is limited or inaccessible in any way then you should go through the usual method to try and acquire your logon details. If you are struggling then you should contact the email provider or ISP responsible for the account. However, they will not usually be able to verify whether you are the genuine user or not so you may struggle to regain access.
Hijacked Email Accounts And Regaining Access
Regaining access to a hijacked email account is actually more difficult than you might hope. As such, it is important to try to prevent the hijacking in the first place. If a hijacker uses software or a virus then you should be able to remove it and at least prevent access to the account from that software. Always ensure that your password is a secure one using numbers, letters, and other characters wherever possible. Also ensure that you never give out this information and that the page you use to log on to the email account is a secure page using https instead of http at the beginning of the address.