How Hackers Hack Your Accounts And Passwords And Ways To Avoid Being Compromised

I am sure most of you have been victims of your email accounts being hacked, or your Facebook passwords not working. Well, this may be a result of your password might have been hacked.

One way to keep yourself secure is by knowing how hackers hack the passwords and the methods and software they generally use.

By knowing how hackers get into your account, you will be in a better situation to understand the ways in which you can lose your account information and passwords and thus can protect yourself from getting hacked next time.

How Do Hackers Get Your Passwords?

One of them is phishing pages. A hacker will send a login page of Gmail or Facebook which looks exactly the same as the real Facebook or Gmail login page.

Most of the times they use social engineering skills where they send a message that says “This person has posted your bad picture on Facebook, click here to check your photo”. Once you click on the link, you will be taken to the login page and as soon as you enter your password, it will be available to the hacker.

Most of the time, the victim doesn’t even realize that the password is gone.

There are many other methods being used by hackers to hack passwords or email access.

1. Keyloggers

This is one of the basic tool used for getting your passwords. Keylogger resides in your system memory and runs at every startup. These keyloggers log all your keystrokes.

A log is created and is then sent to the hacker. One of the most famous is the Ardamax Keylogger. It can be customized to not be shown in “Processes” (Windows Task Manager).

I suggest you to start using Online virtual Keyboard when typing passwords for sensitive sites like your bank account, email and Paypal account. You can also start using a password manager that autofills the login data and thus no key logs are made.

2. RAT

RAT stands for Remote Administration Tool. With RAT, a hacker can connect to your PC without your knowledge. The hacker can see your screen and also see the sites you surf. It also has the built-in functionality of keylogger.

Hackers can copy files from your hard disk to his/her computer – all this without your knowledge. A good example of RAT is Poison Ivy. It can be customized to connect to your PC on a particular port number specified while creating the RAT.

3. Trojan Horses

These are the most common types of malware. Trojans spread through warez sites mostly. All of you want free software.

Right?

Beware though!

When you download from warez sites, all the keygens and patches and even the original trial programs are infected with trojan.

This means you will get the software for free, but your computer will be affected with a trojan horse.

When you run the patch/keygen, you’ll get the desired output, but in the background, your system gets infected with the trojan.

Turkojan is a famous Trojan horse. A trojan is much more superior compared to keyloggers or RATs. It provides much more functionality so that the hacker has greater access to your PC.

These days Android phones are most vulnerable to the trojan horse a.k.a backdoors. Hackers will persuade you to install an apk file which will then install a backdoor apk. This is why you should never install .apk files from untrusted sources. We will talk more about how to safeguard yourself in future articles.

There are many other ways which a hacker uses, for example, if you are connected to the internet on a LAN, which uses the same router, a hacker can use any packet sniffer and base decoder to read all sensitive data being transmitted from your computer. Cain and Abel is one such sniffer, but there are many more.

That’s one reason why I always encourage secure browsing whenever possible. Most sites, like Facebook, give an option to use the https login, which encrypts your data. In such cases, even if the hacker uses the sniffer to capture your data, decoding passwords will not be easy.

Brute forcing is another common method, but with technology advancement, most email and web login forms come with features that can handle such attacks.

Well, to be safe, you have to take preventive methods and make sure you enable all security features offered by the web app you are using. I hope this article helps you to understand how hackers hack so thatt you can take all preventive measures to keep your passwords safe.
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