Interested in preventing email hacking from happening to you?

Believe it or not, hacking emails is commonplace today. There are tons of sites on the internet that teach how you can accomplish this. It’s extremely illegal and not cool. Here’s a few tips so you can prevent your email from being taken over.

1. Never store or send out personal account information in an email

A lot of the time, email accounts are hacked from phishing. Basically, it’s when you get an email that seems to be from a legitimate site, but asks you to update your personal information. I can’t tell you how many people fall for this. All of your information is now visible to the hacker and they can now access credit cards and banking information.

Be careful because these hackers know what they’re doing and work very hard to get the site you’re seeing to look legitimate. If a bank or any financial institution sends you an email with an “important message”, it’s best to NOT click on the links in the email and go directly to the website. If there is any legitimate messages for you, you can find them in there. The majority of the time, you’ll never get asked to update financial records through email from legitimate institutions.

2. There are web browsers today that use phishing filters to prevent this from happening. Firefox and IE 7 have phishing filters so make sure to use either one of those when browsing just to be on the safe side. It can prevent unwanted attacks later on.

3. There are certain filters that will add additional protection in your email account. For instance, if you use Google Mail, you can log into your settings and change any filters in the email client. It’s good to go in and make sure you have an added layer of protection. That is where the bulk of online hacking comes in from.

4. Be wary of clicking links in an email. Even if you know the sender, it’s very possible that their email could have been hacked into and sending out bulk emails to everyone in their address book. Always be watchful and have an anti-virus program installed on your computer just in case. If price is an issue, Microsoft Essentials is free and that program works great for me.

Hope this helps!