Many of you might have been victims of hackers taking over your Facebook, Gmail, or other email accounts.
Some of you may have lost some money to hackers after they took hacked your credit card information. Most of the information hackers get is by hacking your password.
One way of keeping ahead of hackers is by knowing how do hackers hack passwords and what methods and software they generally use.
By knowing how hackers can get into your account, you will be in a 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.
So here are some ways that hackers use to hack your passwords
How do Hackers get Passwords?
There are some common techniques that hackers use 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/Gmail login page.
Most of the time they use Social engineering skills, eg; 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 a login page, as soon as you enter your password, it will be sent to the hacker. Most of the time, hackers use sexual posts to lure victims into divulging their accounts.
Social engineering
The most popular low-tech method for gathering passwords is social engineering. Social engineering takes advantage of the trusting nature of human beings to gain information that later can be used maliciously.
A common social engineering technique is simply to con people into divulging their passwords or security questions that can be used to reset password of the accounts. It sounds ridiculous, but it happens all the time and even the most cautious of people fall prey to it.
Shoulder surfing
Shoulder surfing (the act of looking over someone’s shoulder to see what the person is typing) also known as visual hacking, is an effective, low-tech password hack. It has existed since the time computers became popular but has only been regarded as high risk now. Anyone who has an interest in your passwords has to look over your shoulders and note down the passwords. It can happen at an ATM, in a cyber cafe, or at an airport. You can always protect yourself by glancing around before keying in the password.
Keyloggers
This is one of the basic tools 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. The most famous keylogger is the Ardamax Keylogger. It can be customized so it doesn’t show up in Windows “Processes” and notify the victim.
The best solution to avoiding keyloggers is using Online virtual Keyboard when typing passwords 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, and which sites you surf. It also has the built-in functionality of a 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. Trojans
Now, these are the most common type of malware. Trojans spread through warez sites, torrent websites, or by clicking on mostly risky links. All of you want free software. Right?
Beware though! When you download from warez sites or torrent websites. In all probability, all software, keygens, and patches could contain trojans. This means you will get the software for free, but your computer will be infected by a trojan.
There are many other ways that hacker usually uses, for example, if you are connected to the 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.
To beat such hackers, always avoid public Wi-Fi spots for banking, emails, etc. Log in using HTTPS websites as they encrypt the traffic between you and the server leaving the sniffers toothless. Glance over your shoulders, use hard passwords, and use password management software to manage your passwords.
