Steps to follow when your Email gets hacked

You won’t even notice that your email is actually hacked until one of your contacts points it out after receiving some odd email that you aren’t likely to send.

Most people nowadays realize how crucial it is to protect their email accounts and they take all precautions. But, sometimes bad things just happen even if you take all the right precautions.

Unfortunely, a hacked email account can lead to even more serious problems such as identity theft and many other privacy issues, which have direct effects on your finances and reputation. Because of all this, you have all the right to panic but before or after you do, calm down and pull yourself together and know that you’re up to it!

Since we know that sometimes bad things happen to good people, here are some steps to follow to protect your data, cut your losses, recover control of your e-mail and move forward as smoothly as possible.

1-Work fast: Usually hackers leave the passwords unchanged, get to work quickly by changing your password to a strong one the very first moment you realize your account got hacked. This step will keep the hacker from getting back into your email account and can prevent even future attacks from happening.

Tips: Try this trick to set a strong password: Use a meaningful sentence as the basis of your new password. For example, “I take my cats to the park in the morning” turns into “1tmC2tPAitm”using the first letter of each word in the sentence, mixing uppercase and lowercase letters and replacing “I” with “1” and “to” with “2”.

Furthermore, use 2-step verification so that whenever your account is opened from a new location a code will be to your number via text message, so unless the hacker has your device, you alone can have the code and access your account.

2-Check your email settings: Scan your account settings and check if anything was changed. Hackers could possibly change your setting in various ways. One way is to automatically forward a copy of every email you receive to themselves, which can easily allow them to obtain login information and email addresses on your contact list.

Also, check your email signature and out-of-office reply (if you use ones) to make sure that the hacker have not added spammy links that lead to malicious sites if anyone clicks on them.

3-Change all accounts passwords: Once your email account has been compromised, all your other accounts are at high risk as a result. Don’t hesitate a moment as the bad guys might be in the process of accessing your other accounts. Change all passwords as quickly as you can, and of course never ever use the same password on more than one account.

4-Finally, prevent it from happening again: Now that your hacked email account is recovered, you need to make sure that it won’t happen again.

Tips: Picking a strong password is one of the most crucial protection steps against this type of hacking. You can use the trick mentioned before to come up with a strong password.

Using a public network can be very risky since most hackers and cybercriminals hunt their victim’s public networks.

However, instead of avoiding all public networks, you can simply use VPN.Express which will protect your online privacy and personal against anyone trying to break into your device.

VPN.Express is dedicated to those who want to be secured, protected, private, and enjoy the internet freely!

Be safe. Be free.