What happens when a cyber criminal steals your account? – 11/21/16
So, the worst has happened…someone has hacked your account and taken it over. You have called the help desk and had the password reset. All is good right? Wrong. When a cyber criminal gets ownership of your account whether it is an email, social media profile or gaming account they typically do the following:
- Change your name
- Forward any mail to another account
- Delete/steal your mail or delete/steal content or credits
- Change your signature
- Add secondary email addresses to the account
- Steal any stored credit card data.
This means when you get your account back you have to:
- Make sure the correct name is associated with the account
- Check to see if mail is being forwarded
- Ensure the email signature is correct
- Look for secondary email addresses that have been added and delete them
- Cancel any credit cards associated with the account
If that isn’t irritating enough, lets add one more goody to the list of annoyances that come with a compromised account…if your account was used for spamming, you will have the joy of receiving hate mail as well as having a lot of messages that you send to others bounce back due to spam blockers. Unfortunately there is no way to re-mediate that. For this reason, most people who have their accounts hacked will end up abandoning them and creating a new one. But hey…you got your account back.