Cybersecurity Blog

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.