Most common cases for your account being hacked
Most common cases for your account being hacked:
- Logging in to your Yahoo account on a public (or even shared) computer is generally a bad idea. Your family member might’ve not installed a keylogger on the computer, but his friend, or one of the downloaded applications might.
What happens here usually, is that a net-naïve “common user” reads an advertisement for a game / free hacking tool / keygen / any other piece of software, and naively assumes the executable to be safe. More ofthen than not, these pimped executables contains malicious droploads, that can modify your operating system in any number of ways: add keylogging, enroll your computer into a viral spamming swarm, amongst others
- Netcafees are especially hazardous in this regard: most of them routinely employ keyloggers, usually working on behalf of either the owner of the coffee, or a local blackhat looking for easy cash.
- Using the same password, or having low password diversity across many accounts. Giving out your master password to anonym sites is a very bad idea.
There are a lot of free services out there, who’s main business model is taking over e-mail accounts. The service itself might seem harmless, but by cross-referencing your e-mail address with your password, they can easily take over your account.
- Using insecure passwords. With the advent of social networking sites, anyone can figure out your mom/firstborn/dog’s name; furthermore, there are increasingly more spiders (small piece of software scraping these sites for useful data) employed by blackhat hackers.
A good rule of thumb, is that your password should be unique to each site, and contain at least 8 mixed-case/numeric characters .
- “Website spoofing” has been around for years now. It works by masquarading as a different website –eg, a site looking exactly like yahoo.com –and sending you a fake password reset e-mail. By going to the site, and logging in, you’re giving out your yahoo credentials to a third party –to their benefit.