A Small Guide to Email Security How to protect our email accounts from hackers and what are the mistakes we commit which makes us vulnerable. Before starting the real ways through which hackers hack our email address, please understand the reasons through which we got compromised.

1. Simple and Guessable Passwords : We are entering into 2014 era, but still last year NASSCOM survey created a blunder in information security market when they revealed that in India’s 60% of Email users, specifically between the age group of 30 to 40 years and above have their official email password as their phone number. It is a big vulnerability. Passwords like phone no, children names, wife, girlfriend names, etc., are very much common password and it can be cracked very easily now-a-days. So if you still have your password as phone no then I think it’s the time to change it.

Secret Question / Recovery Questions: Every email service as well as the websites like Facebook, has a feature known as secret question option for forgotten password recovery option. Again problem is that people put secret question which can easily be guessed. Like “What is your pet name” ”Where was I born” etc, and if you have this kind of secret questions, we highly recommend you to change your password. Putting a secure password: Now question arises what should I do, what kind of password should I place? First you should understand that before placing any password you should know about how secure password is. And how much time will it take to be cracked by hackers. So for checking, one can go to a website known as, www.howsecureismypassword.net which gives a free facility to check your password.

Type a password and test the security level of the password.

Weak Password

Strong Password

Long password with complex characters including Numeric would be the best password.