You probably think that you have your email account well protected or you think it is just an email account not a bank account and there is nothing you should worry about. However, there is actually so much personal information involved to your emails and your data will become vulnerable and be stolen if your account is hacked. Besides, once your account got hijacked, not only you but also your contacts will have the same risk of being scammed. For instance, you would find yourself locked out of your own account and your friends or family will receive any kind of fake emails sent on your behalf to deceive them for money emergency or to trick them on giving out more personal data. Now keep reading to learn what you should do immediately if your email account has been hacked. Here are some recommendations that can help you to reduce the damages and keep your data safe as much as you can.
Change your passwords immediately:
If you suspect that someone is using your email account, you should change it and create a strong password immediately for the replacement. However, email account password is not the only one you need to change up and you should change the passwords for all other sites as well in order to prevent more harms from data leaking.
Recover back your account:
In most of the cases when the email account got hacked, users can no longer login their account with the old passwords. Therefore, many famous email providers like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are designed to have the special section of account recovery for people whose account got compromised so they can recover back their account by answering some security question.
Report the incident to your email provider:
Contact and report the incident to your email provider’s security team is another highly important step to do. That’s because they got the chance to use such information to find out any criminal pattern behind, and then work with local law enforcement team in order to catch the people who did it.
Alert your family and friends:
Remember to inform the people you know such as your family, friends and acquaintances that your email has been hacked in case that they might be receiving emails from your account asking for money or personal data. Therefore, it’s necessary to protect your contacts from being scammed and you should also tell them not to open any files from your hijacked account and even run a security scan to detect any possible malware.
Double check the account setting:
In case that you can still use your old passwords to login your email account but it’s certainly hacked by some others. You should definitely go to your email account and double check on some settings to ensure your information is still safe. For example, your signature wasn’t changed by the hacker or the forwarding policies haven’t altered to automatically forward the emails received from banks or other important entities.
Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
