Hotmail Yahoo Gmail Accounts hacked and used to send spam

You might have heard recent news buzz about yahoo, gmail and hotmail email accounts being compromised. Earlier thsi week, Microsoft acknowledged about 30,000 hotmail accounts being compromised. Such compromised accounts are used to send spam emails to all contacts of such accounts. The spam email contains fake sites which tries to steal personal or other financial information from the innocent.

If you have not read about what email spamming techniques, read it now. Spamming is gradually finding new ways. Even it is predicted that YouTube – The video community can be used to spam especially on gmail accounts (The spammers would send spam video to gmail users as gmail automatically embed youtube videos.). While phising is attributed reason for the hacking of email accounts but some industry experts’ insights suggest that keylogging is the prime reason behind increased and easy hacking of email accounts. Actually keyloggers are programs that sit stealthily on your computer and it records all the keys you press on your keyboard, it then send this record to a specified hacker. Not to surprise, now a days, even hardware keyloggers are available which are plugged into keyboard socket in cpu and the keyboard pin is then plugged in to that hardware keylogger. Such hardware based keyloggers can be found installed in cybe-cafe.

TO safeguard yourself :

Use a leading security product like antivirus, antispyware, etc.

Update your security product regularly

Don’t click suspicious links you receive from any body. First analyse those links.

Use on-screen(virtual) keyboard to type your account passwords.

Use strong passwords, Find your password retrieval options and fix it beforehand so that you know what to do if your account is compromised.

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