Some people just aren’t aware how valuable their information is. Not financial information of course, most people understand that it isn’t a good idea to be too free with Social Security numbers, bank account numbers and more. But everyday information, for example, the names of friends, family and associates located in their email contact list. Spammers who made their living by sending emails to people in hopes to scam them out of money would send an email with a link that they would have to click.
Recent changes in email security has made that type of spam almost a thing of the past. Very few of these phishing or scam emails actually make it into your inbox. The spam filter on new email security keeps spammers frustrated, so they have a new mode of attack. They seek to hijack the email accounts and defeat the security by sending an email to everyone in the contact list. Ordinarily, someone who is in your contacts list sends an email and it goes right to the inbox. Spammers are using this to send requests for money posing as the person whose account they have hijacked.
Google has taken steps now to defeat this latest tactic. In the research by Google, they observed one spammer using stolen passwords to break into a million different Google accounts each day for several weeks at a time. To prevent this onslaught of hacking Gmail accounts Google has added a complex risk analysis to ascertain whether the person attempting to access the account is the one who it belongs to. If the analysis throws up a red flag as to the true identity of the person attempting to access the account, there is a “Verify Your Identity” screen that requires the input of the account holder’s phone number.
This has cut the number of hacked accounts by 99.7% since its inception. They have also added the extra layer of protection of a two-step verification system to further cut down on the chances that your account will be hacked.
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