The probability of a digital attack

[Sanquinius96]

I wanted to check my email this morning, when I was quite surprised to find out that my email account was locked. There was not a single reason I could come up with why this would happened (except the auto-forwarded spam that sometimes slip through the spam-filter).

After some very easy steps to it reactivated, I finally was given a reason; my account could've been the target of Chinese hacking-attempt.

This made my head spin a bit, why would they hack plain-simple-run-off-the-mill user accounts? Does anyone else have similar experiences?

 

[Gentleman_Reptile]

Run of the mil accounts are probably the juiciest targets for hackers (who are pure, concentrated asshats), because they can get ahold of bank details and the like.

 

[Sanquinius96]

Hmm, is there anyway that an internet-commoner can try to defend itself from these attacks?

I don't mind sharing, except the details required for me to pay rent and stuff.

 

[flaming_squirrel]

Go into your routers security logs section and marvel at what's inside, you're being 'attacked' all the time.
I've checked out the ip's of some in the past, nearly always ends up coming from China or Romania.


Which email provider are you with by the way?

 

[Sanquinius96]

Go into your routers security logs section and marvel at what's inside, you're being 'attacked' all the time.
I've checked out the ip's of some in the past, nearly always ends up coming from China or Romania.


Which email provider are you with by the way?

Well I'm quite a sucker when it comes to these things, though it's interesting to see that Romania is among them . Never knew they had a tough time. Are there more countries who are into these hackings?

I use Ziggo, a provider in the Netherlands.

 

[Vampire cat]

We should form an extremist group of anti-hackers who travel from town to town shooting the hacking asshats in their scrawny hackers face! OO I'll go skin some cats for dinner now, byes!

 

[flaming_squirrel]

Well I'm quite a sucker when it comes to these things, though it's interesting to see that Romania is among them . Never knew they had a tough time. Are there more countries who are into these hackings?

I use Ziggo, a provider in the Netherlands.

It's mainly the same old 3-4 countries who are in to it as their cybercrime laws/systems are, well, shit.
Never heard of Ziggo but the best thing you can do is make a password which is hard to hack, made it complex, combination of upper, lower case and numbers. Dont use popular words of phrases, the best type is something seemingly random as it'll be vastly more difficult to brute force it.

 

[Sanquinius96]

Well I'm quite a sucker when it comes to these things, though it's interesting to see that Romania is among them . Never knew they had a tough time. Are there more countries who are into these hackings?

I use Ziggo, a provider in the Netherlands.

It's mainly the same old 3-4 countries who are in to it as their cybercrime laws/systems are, well, shit.
Never heard of Ziggo but the best thing you can do is make a password which is hard to hack, made it complex, combination of upper, lower case and numbers. Dont use popular words of phrases, the best type is something seemingly random as it'll be vastly more difficult to brute force it.

Thanks for the tip!

By the way, how do they hack themselves into an account? Seems like quite a challenge to me...

 

[flaming_squirrel]

The simplest way to hack into an something with a password (outside of social engineering) is brute forcing it. Basically a vast list of common passes which it runs through until yours is found, it's slow and not effective at all if you have a decent one. There are other versions of this which use algorithms and the like but cant remember for the life of me how that works.

There's much more complicated methods of hacking stuff out there as well, but that's about as much as I know/can remember.

 

[Sanquinius96]

I guess they've made hacking into quite a science then.

 

[Sanquinius96]

Run of the mil accounts are probably the juiciest targets for hackers (who are pure, concentrated asshats), because they can get ahold of bank details and the like.

If you have bank statements sent via email, or passwords or anything like that, you might as well paint a target on your face. :/

Hehe, well luckily I'm not that ignorant. Though I, honestly, understated the vulnerability of my email account. I thought gmail was a small fortress, considering the size of Google on the internet and it's relative exposure to threats.

 

[Sanquinius96]

Eheh, I actually have 40 gmail accounts I use, for various things. If my magic one somehow gets picked, I deserved it.

Yeah, or that hacker got real lucky and should've been in a casino at that time.

 

[Sanquinius96]

And a whole lot of more security as well

 

[flaming_squirrel]

Eheh, I actually have 40 gmail accounts I use, for various things. If my magic one somehow gets picked, I deserved it.

40?! What the hell are you going to do with that many?

 

[DividedUnity]

I have multiple accounts but really the only thing you can do to make sure it isnt hacked is to use a strong passwords. Also if you have any sensitive emails like bank statements. Print screen them onto a memory stick then delete them from your inbox and deleted folder.