ALERT: Protect Your Email Account Like You Protect Your Front Door

You must take more steps to protect your personal email account, which is the entryway to your online life. This article provides a handful of practical tips to help you do that. More importantly, you need to know why it’s vital that you act and protect your email.

Hackers and scammers constantly try to pry into peoples’ accounts to learn or steal personal information. From there, they will try to steal our money or identities to commit credit fraud or identity theft. 

We all hear about accounts of identity theft or investment scams, such as pig butchering, but we hear little about how they start. Oftentimes, it’s by criminals using or compromising our personal email accounts. (If someone with bad intentions knows your email address, they will often try to find your password…if they don’t already have it.)

You can start by not giving everyone your email account.

Do you give your home address to anyone asking for it? Probably not, and with good reason—if they don’t need it, why should they know it?

One key step in better protecting your email is not giving it to every store, company, or organization that asks for it. Providing your email is not always required; often, a business wants it only to send you discounts and special offers. (That’s why your email inbox is so full!)

Of course, an email address is essential in today’s world, as much as our cell phones. It has become our primary connection to the online world. Everybody wants your email address…but not everybody NEEDS to have it. That’s your choice and your call.

Remember that anyone with it knows where you live “digitally.” They can bombard you with information and might sell your email address to a data broker.

Also, do not falsely believe that an established, well-known organization that needs your email address will protect it well. They’ll try, but they could also fail.

Companies do not protect your email, so you have to.

Maybe you’ve heard of a data breach, but you’re unsure precisely what it is or if you should be concerned. Here’s an explanation:

• In a data breach, skilled hackers break into an organization’s computer network. The attack, or breach, often goes unnoticed for a while, sometimes months. Until then, the hackers steal as much data as possible, often including the personally identifiable information (PII) of the business’s or organization’s customers.
• Your information could be included in the data breach. If you did business with the hacked company (say it was AT&T) and you have an account with them), your information would be taken.
• However, even if you have never heard of the breached company, personal information about YOU could still be stolen. How? Because hundreds of businesses (often data brokers) have profiles of you based on data they’ve acquired, often legally. Learn more about that here.

Here’s the scary part: Once email addresses fall into the wrong hands, there’s a greater chance the criminals might work on discovering the email passwords and compromising our accounts.

Even scarier? The information stolen in a data breach sometimes includes passwords. Even if it doesn’t, hackers and cybercriminals have ways to guess or uncover passwords…it happens all the time.

Protecting your password is vital to protecting your personal email.

Most people will likely never tell someone else their password. If they do, it’s a family member or someone they trust. That would seem good enough to protect your email, but unfortunately, it’s not.

Here are three reasons why.

1. Many people use the same password for different accounts, assuming the chance of being hacked is low. That’s a bad idea. If one password gets stolen or discovered, all the accounts are at risk.
2. Many people still use very weak passwords for their accounts, such as “1234,” “abcd,” and “qwerty” (from the keyboard). Hackers can use computers to test thousands of passwords in seconds.
3. Data breaches often steal old passwords, and hackers can test them (and hundreds of versions) in seconds.

Your passwords are the key to opening your online accounts, and you certainly don’t want them in the wrong hands or too easy for crafty cybercriminals to duplicate.

The good news is that you don’t have to tackle creating better and safer passwords yourself. There are password manager programs and apps that make it easy and easier to protect your email.

Even if you decide a password manager isn’t for you, there is one more step you can take to protect your email better than you’re doing right now. That step, coincidentally, is adding one more step to logging into your email address.

Two-factor authentication locks out cyber crooks for good!

Fact: You only need your username and password to open your email account, even if your password is long and one-of-a-kind. Well, that means ANYONE who knows your email address and your username (which are easy to get) needs only your password to log in and open your email account. That’s why cybercrooks work so hard to steal, uncover, or figure out passwords.

However, there’s a way to prevent someone from logging in…even if they have your password.

This extra security layer is two-factor authentication (2FA) or two-step verification. Here’s how Google explains it with their Gmail accounts:

“After you set up 2FA, you’ll need to complete a second step to verify your identity when you sign in. This adds an extra layer of security to your account in case your password is stolen.”

With two-factor authentication, your username and password alone are not enough to log in successfully. Instead, after you enter your information, you (and only you) receive a one-time code (by phone or computer) to enter to finish logging in.

Hackers are locked out and stopped cold if they try to log in to your account with stolen credentials because they don’t get the one-time code and, therefore, can’t finish logging in.

The good news is that email 2FA is free to users and easy to set up. You can explore different levels of two-step verification, but they all do the same thing: They block strangers from opening your email account.

We have an informative, easy-to-read article on two-factor authentication on WhatIsMyIPAddress.com.

Protect your email…and more.

Which of your online accounts (which all have passwords) deserves the most protection?

• A bank account
• A credit card/loan account
• Medical/doctor accounts
• Your Social Security account
• Your personal and primary checking account

Hopefully, after reading this article, you realize that your primary email account, which links to all your financial, credit, and medical accounts, deserves to be protected as much as the others…if not more. After all, your email is the gateway to your online life.

Visit our Learning Center and explore more topics on WhatIsMyIPaddress.com that can help boost your awareness of online safety.