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How do Hackers Hack your Passwords?
Many of you might have been victims of your email accounts being hacked, or your Facebook password not working. This maybe because your password might have been hacked by the Hackers.
One way to keep your self secure is by knowing how do hackers hack password and what all methods and software’s they generally use. By knowing how hackers can get into your account, you will be in better situation to understand what are the possible ways you can lose your account information and passwords & you can protect yourself from getting hacked next time.
How do Hackers get Passwords?
There are some common technique which hackers uses to hack passwords. One of them is phishing pages, where a hacker will send a login page of Gmail or Facebook and it will look exactly the same as real Facebook login page. Most of the time they use Social engineering skills like, they will send message saying “This person has posted your bad picture on Facebook, click here to check your photo”, and once you click on the link, you will be taken to login page, as soon as you enter your password, it will be sent to hacker, and your page will reload to take you to the real page. Most of the time, victim don’t even realize his password is gone.
Hackers hack people passwords for many reasons, some of them are just showing their skills and some of them hack for profits. Many of them will use your Email account to send spam links to your contact list or use your Facebook account to send spam application link. Though, the major problem comes when hackers get hold of your private and sensitive data and black-mail starts. Like I mentioned above, Similarly, there are many other methods which I have listed below are being used by hackers to hack anyone password 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 the keystrokes you type. A log is created and then it is sent to the Hacker. Most famous keylogger is the Ardamax Keylogger. It can be customized so that it cannot be shown in “Processes” (Windows Task Manager).
I suggest you to start using Online virtual Keyboard when typing password for sensitive sites like your bank account and Paypal account.
2. RAT
RAT stands for Remote Administration Tool. With RAT, a hacker can connect to your PC, without your knowledge. He can see what is going on the screen, what you are currently doing, which sites you surf. It also has the built-in functionality of keylogger.
Hacker can copy files from your Hard disk to his computer, and 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
Now these are the most common type of malwares. Trojans spread through warez sites mostly. All of you want free softwares. Right? Beware though! When you download from warez sites, all the keygens and patches and even the original trial programs are trojaned. 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 background, your system gets infected with the trojan. Turkojan is a famous Trojan horse. A trojan is much more superior to keyloggers and RATs. It provides much more functions, so that a Hacker has more access to your PC.
There are many other ways which hacker usually uses, for example if you are connected to 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 and there are many more.
That’s one reason why I always suggest to enable secure browsing where ever possible. Most of sites like Facebook gives an option to use https login, which encrypts your data and even hacker uses sniffer to capture data, decoding password with those data will not be easy. Brute forcing is another common method, but with technology advancement, most of Email and Web login forms, comes with handling such attack.
How to protect yourself from hacking:
- Install a good licensed anti-virus. I suggest you go for Kaspersky. It’s the best anti-virus out there.
- Always have your Windows Firewall turned on.
- Never ever trust warez sites. There is a lot of malware flowing out there.
- Don’t run .exe programs given by anyone. Trust only yourself.
- Never auto-play a pen drive. By this, malware automatically gets installed on your PC.
- Don’t run attachments from emails.
- If you want to run .exe files safely, run them sandboxed. A free applicationSandboxie is available for this purpose.
- If you feel you’re infected, format your PC immediately. No anti-virus can remove a Trojan horse from your PC. It’s very difficult to remove a trojan from an infected PC.
Well, to be safe, you have to take all preventive method and make sure you enable all security features offered by web app you are using. I hope this article will help you to understand how do hackers hack and you can take all preventive measures to keep your password safe. If you find this article useful, don’t forget to share it on Google plus and Facebook for more social awareness.
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