Hacked

Until now, I had always believed that hacking was something that happened to others. As it usually happens, unless we come in the line of fire, we cannot really gauge the extent of damage it can inflict. And so, I watched sympathetically from sidelines as people around me suffered at the hands of odious hackers who had (and still have) nothing better to do with their time. But then came a day, when this comfortable notions also shattered to smithreens

It all started when my sister’s email accounts recently got hacked. The twisted hacker apparently made the connection between my sister and me, and soon I got these mysterious password reset requests, which I knew I had not sent. The warning bells began ringing, and without further ado, I decided to ‘clean up’ my email accounts.

Cleaning up any email account, as I discovered the hard way, is no easy task. My account was a goldmine of personal information given the number of times I had notified my friends that my cell number had changed, or the innumerable times I had mass-mailed photos of various occasions. I could only imagine that if there was a maniacal hacker on the loose, what a field day s/he would have with all my personal information, including photos.

So I decided to begin with personal information, using the good old search feature to look up all those emails which contained my contact details. Once they were gotten rid of, the next step was photos. Again, a thorough search using every possible search term from the obvious ‘photos’ to ‘jpg’ yielded a whole bunch of emails. Next step: Select All. Delete.

The internet users who use Gmail must be familiar with their default option of saving chat histories. And since I was in mood to make my conversations with my friends public, I figured the best thing would be to delete that as well. Opening my Chat folder, I discovered a good 142 chats saved there. Now groaning audibly, I set about the task of copy/pasting some very hilarious and enlightening chats into Notepad files and saving them onto my desktop.

An hour or so later, the dull headache which had begun post-photos had evolved into full-fledged throbbing. I attacked my list of contacts next. The potential hacker may get into my account, but I was not going to hand him/her a 400 or so potential victims. Exporting all my contacts into an Excel file, I selected all of them and pressed the delete button. A little pop-up informed me that contacts could only be deleted 20 at a time. Great! I thought. But since there was no other option, I proceeded to manually select 20 contacts at a time and delete them.

Now I could comfortably say that my email account was purged of as much personal information as I could get rid off. Of course, it was only one second later that I realised I had spoken too soon. Yes, I had just caught sight of the folder that contained email exchanges with my husband. And there was another folder of email exchanges with my best friend. And my headache grew worse.

Suffice to say that I managed to save most of my mails that day, and forwarded others to an alternative email account. But this experience highlighted one very glaring fact —our email inboxes contain way too much information about ourselves. Perhaps, if and when you have time and patience, try scrutinising your mail from an outsider’s point of view. You may find that every email seems private.

Since our email accounts are always vulnerable to being hacked, there are a few precautionary measures one can take. First and foremost, keep a suitable password that would be hard to crack. Avoid dictionary words or your cell numbers or names of your relatives. The best way would be to write a long sentence, take the first alphabet of every word and combine it with familiar numbers. You can write it down if you think you will not remember it, but be careful about where you keep the information.

Secondly, make a secondary email address, which is not public. Set up a POP3 account so that every mail from your primary email address gets forwarded there. In this case, even if you lose your primary account, you can still have access to all your important mails, and can also delete from the primary account. Make sure you periodically export your list of contacts to an Excel file on your PC, so that you can import it in another email account when you need it.

Third and most importantly, whenever your account is hacked, immediately notify your email service, and request them to block/disable that account. Also, send out a mass message to your entire list of contacts that they should block and delete the hacked email address, especially from their instant messengers and social networking profiles. This will prevent the hacker from abusing your information or impersonating you online. The latter, of course, is far more sinister and prevalent than you can imagine. Most of the people simply make a new email address and do not understand that someone might just be having the time of his/her life at their expense.

Also, try and keep your inbox free from personal information like cell numbers and photos. Delete these mails immediately after you have sent or received them. If you are having a private conversation with someone over email, save those mails in Notepad and delete them from the inbox. Remember, hackers can be vicious. At the end of the day, you cannot do much about hackers. Neither can you do anything about the time that they have to waste. But what you can do is ensure that your email inboxes contain no personal or sensitive information that would compromise your privacy and security if someone breaks into your account.