WEYBURN - Trust me, it is not a great feeling when you get hacked. In this day and age, we are all told to be extra vigilant when it comes to opening fishy emails or text messages. Sometimes your instinct tells you that something is off, and unfortunately there are other times when you fall victim to the scam and become part of the issue.
There is a sick feeling in your stomach when you do fall for the spam, even though you are a victim of the hacking attempts. You feel responsible for anyone else who got an email from your account, and leading the hackers to more potential victims to scam.
It can happen so easily. Hackers use social engineering techniques to trick victims into handing over their email passwords. Often, these techniques can be very convincing.
Your email account is a treasure trove of valuable information, which is why hackers want to get hold of it. Anyone who hacks your email gains access to your contact list, which they can use for phishing attempts to carry out further fraud.
Also, email addresses are often the primary identifier in many login programs. If a hacker wants to gain entry to your online accounts, then knowing your email address is an excellent first step.
We do so much online, that this issue is exactly the reason why many login programs now recommend a two-step validation. It is definitely a good idea to go through the process of setting up a two-step validation for anything online that has personal information, just in case your email is compromised.
One of the biggest recommendations to ensuring online security is to change any passwords at least every six months.
The other big recommendation is to avoid using the same password for all your login sites. Of course, the password rules continue to be the same, such as not using birthdates or common words. Hackers have become so adept that they use a tactic called credential stuffing, whereby they access previously stolen usernames and passwords into as many online services as possible to get access to the account.
It is very difficult to legislate the online world, it makes it challenging to penalize the hackers, and places more responsibility on the everyday person to be online smart, and not allow themselves to be hacked. The fact that we have to be vigilant does lead to not trusting anything we are sent anymore.
The online world is so much bigger, and full of pitfalls, that we all have to watch out for. It is not like our small communities, where we know our neighbours and can count on them. The best way to protect our selves online is to be extra cautious, and take the time to check out suspicious links before clicking on them. Do your best not to blame yourself, when you do get scammed. It does happen, but you should learn from the mistakes to protect yourself.
