Whenever you get hacked, phished, had malware installed or just don’t know
what has happed to your email, here are few steps that you must take after you
are find anything fishy.
Ask yourself why it is happening
When you are fixing all the problems that are coming in front of you it is
better to ask yourself some questions: what is the reason for this breach? If
it is your bank account then in other case such as email can be the host of
this reason- that can be used for sending spam, for requesting money from your
contacts, getting password resets on other services. An attacker can try to
gain access to your business.
Reset Your Passwords
You need to immediately change the password of the affected services and any other that uses that same or similar password. And don’t reuse that password again. You need to change your password periodically as a part of routine maintenance. “Password reuse is one of the great evils and it’s very hard to prevent,” so it is also recommended to make a habit of changing password at regular interval and use different password for different accounts.
Update and Scan
There is a possibility that the attacker can get into your machine because
of you. Almost all malware get installed by victims themselves. It may happen
when you unknowingly you did so to get rid of these nasty processes before
starting the recovery processes. You need to make sure that you are running the
most recent version of your operating system. Anti-spyware is the best in hitting
almost 90 percent of the threats that can corrupt your system.
Take Back Your Account
Most of the major online services that have tools in place to help
you get your account back after it has been taken over by someone else. There
are many accounts that need a few answers for recovering back the account. For
example: Facebook has a novel method that relies on friend
verification.
Check for Backdoors
Smart hackers do not get into your account they set up tools to make sure that they are getting back in once you get them out. Once you have your account back, you immediately need make sure that there is not any back door somewhere designed to let an attacker back in. So it is better to check the email rules and filters make yourself that nothing is getting forwarded to another account without your knowledge.
Perform a Security Audit on your Affected Accounts
often one account is simply used as a gateway to another account. The Dropbox account may only be a means to get at something stored there. Your email may be the only path to your online banking. So not only you need to secure your account and prevent hacking you need to know what has hacked it and check all the other that it touches it as well. You need to rest your password on those services and treat them as it they have been compromised.
