My Gmail Account Hacked - Need Help Getting It Back

Replies

• 

  Pensu

  Hey, password changing is most effective in these cases. If you are changing it frequently then its impossible for him to be online from your account. But if its still happening that means he/she somehow knows your password. I suggest you just keep changing passwords for some time. Make it a frequent habit, this make it hard for hackers to guess the password. Secondly you should activate advanced security option in gmail. I guess, they have the option that when you log into your account from a different machine instead of regular one, they ask you to verify your identity through a SMS or something. Try that. And if the problem persists, you can go to police too. Cyber crime laws are strict in our country and hacking into someones's account is illegal. And yeah, dont share your password with anyone and keep it random, nothing like your birth-date or something. Hope this helps.
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  #-Link-Snipped-# - There's a systematic mechanism to deal with the situation. It may not be as bad as you think. The first step is to confirm that someone's actually trying to break into your account. Follow these steps -
  
  1. Log into your gmail account.
  2. Scroll down to the bottom of inbox messages. Check the link "Last Account Activity: x minutes ago" (Details).
  3. Click on the 'Details' link. It will show you the details of your latest activity. Check if there's anything suspicious.
  4. You will also get an option to log out of all the accounts at once. Click on that button so that you're logged out of all the services that you log into using this gmail account of yours.
  5. Give it some time and check whether you really appear online to your friends.
  
  You should change your account password; but make it very difficult to guess. Typically if you can make a password that is about 8 characters long with a combination of smaLL and CAPitaL letters, use spec!al ch@racters and number5, you should be able to form a password too tough to crack.
  
  I'd also recommend you to change your gmail password from another computer. It might be possible that someone's cracked your computer and installed a keylogger. A keylogger is a program that will store all the keystrokes on your keyboard and pass them on to the hacker. Get another PC OR do it through your mobile. If you don't have access to any of that; get a uBuntu LIVE CD and connect to Internet with it.
  
  I'd also recommend you to perform a cleanup of your machine. If a computer is infected with a virus, it's always safer option to perform a clean format and install the operating system again. Also make sure that you don't download stuff from torrents.
  
  Make sure that you don't share your password with anyone, ever!
• 

  Anoop Kumar

  Is your blog popular... then its common that people face such hacker attack.
  You should activate#-Link-Snipped-# (password+One time sms verification).
  Also as above suggested ... try to scan your machine with Home - Spybot Anti-Malware and Antivirus : Spybot Anti-Malware and Antivirusand#-Link-Snipped-#, It will certainly find any spyware problem in your machine. In Hijack This , analyze you PC and fix those problem which seems suspicious.
  This will surely help you.
• 

  Anoop Mathew

  #-Link-Snipped-# #-Link-Snipped-# #-Link-Snipped-#
  Yes, I've activated the 2 step verification. There were multiple attempts even after that. I understood that there was uncommon activity just like Big K said. And I've logged in from another system now. Will do that clean up you guys mentioned now. Thanks a lot! 😀
  
  However, a hacker has got into my friend's MSN ID, and he's using her images for un-ethical purposes. Trying to solve that now!!!😡
• 

  Anoop Mathew

  ianoop

  Is your blog popular... then its common that people face such hacker attack.
  You should activate#-Link-Snipped-# (password+One time sms verification).
  Also as above suggested ... try to scan your machine with Home - Spybot Anti-Malware and Antivirus : Spybot Anti-Malware and Antivirusand#-Link-Snipped-#, It will certainly find any spyware problem in your machine. In Hijack This , analyze you PC and fix those problem which seems suspicious.
  This will surely help you.

  Is Glary Utility a similar tool? Any ideas on that? Basic registry clean up should do the trick right?
• 

  Anoop Kumar

  anoopthefriend

  Is Glary Utility a similar tool? Any ideas on that? Basic registry clean up should do the trick right?

  Never used Glary Utility ..... It is like Tune Up utilities for performance and registry fix.
  Spybot is kind of antivirus which focuses on spyware only, and Hijack This is overall system analyzer if there any problem with your system. It report about all the system software , start up including trusted software too. Many of them may not be really problem. So leave the trusted softwares and fix unidentified problems.
  
  Trying to hack your ID and your using your friends photo... I think hacker is one the person who knows about you.Two step verification surely helps you to get the rid out of this problem.
  
  Publishing photos to public is one of major side effect of internet and quite disturbing too.
  If it is used on Facebook kind of social networking only way to deal this problem is marking spam by all your friend circle to that profile and report to site about it.
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  When someone uploads a photo to any open platform; be it Facebook or any other service, one must be aware of the potential exploits. It's become very easier for anyone to get access other's photos and use them in any way they want. I've never uploaded any of my own photos on social networking websites. I was compelled to use my headshot by Google (as a part of their authorship program) and that's why I've this photo that uploaded on my own on the Internet. I don't think I'll ever upload any of the personal photos online.
  
  Getting back on the track - hacking into Gmail isn't very easy, I'm not saying it's impossible. It requires a very seasoned cracker who can really break into other's account bypassing security.
  
  Remember to 'log-out' of all your sessions by clicking on the button in step #4 I suggested. Without properly logging out of Google account; your other steps may not prove very useful. I'd not rely on spyware checkers very much. You could quickly perform an eye-scan on the processes that are running on your machine that look suspicious. Note that the hackers usually make a spy-process that is very similar to the original authentic process (ieexplore vs ieeexplore) - which are difficult to catch.
  
  Perform a cleanup and don't use USB drives that you've used on other machines. That's also one of the ways through which the malware spreads.
• 

  Anoop Mathew

  The_Big_K

  When someone uploads a photo to any open platform; be it Facebook or any other service, one must be aware of the potential exploits. It's become very easier for anyone to get access other's photos and use them in any way they want. I've never uploaded any of my own photos on social networking websites. I was compelled to use my headshot by Google (as a part of their authorship program) and that's why I've this photo that uploaded on my own on the Internet. I don't think I'll ever upload any of the personal photos online.
  
  Getting back on the track - hacking into Gmail isn't very easy, I'm not saying it's impossible. It requires a very seasoned cracker who can really break into other's account bypassing security.
  
  Remember to 'log-out' of all your sessions by clicking on the button in step #4 I suggested. Without properly logging out of Google account; your other steps may not prove very useful. I'd not rely on spyware checkers very much. You could quickly perform an eye-scan on the processes that are running on your machine that look suspicious. Note that the hackers usually make a spy-process that is very similar to the original authentic process (ieexplore vs ieeexplore) - which are difficult to catch.
  
  Perform a cleanup and don't use USB drives that you've used on other machines. That's also one of the ways through which the malware spreads.

  I failed to look at the title edit on this post during my previous login. The point to note here is that my account was not 'hacked', it was only multiple attempts. The hacker who tried to get into my google account was spotted by Google, with location and IP address of his PC. They have mailed me the details. Google is highly secure and a good service in that case. I had immediately switched to 2 step verification which led to more security. I think the title should be edited again #-Link-Snipped-#
  
  #-Link-Snipped-# - It was 2 separate hack cases that I'm talking about.
  1> My google account has multiple attempts to get hacked.
  2> My friend's MSN (hotmail) account was hacked, and the hacker has control over it. And my friend did post her photo on her MSN profile.
  
  Both may be different hackers. I thought the same guy had hacked my friend so I mentioned like that on my first post.
• 

  Anoop Mathew

  ianoop

  Never used Glary Utility ..... It is like Tune Up utilities for performance and registry fix.
  Spybot is kind of antivirus which focuses on spyware only, and Hijack This is overall system analyzer if there any problem with your system. It report about all the system software , start up including trusted software too. Many of them may not be really problem. So leave the trusted softwares and fix unidentified problems.
  
  Trying to hack your ID and your using your friends photo... I think hacker is one the person who knows about you.Two step verification surely helps you to get the rid out of this problem.
  
  Publishing photos to public is one of major side effect of internet and quite disturbing too.
  If it is used on Facebook kind of social networking only way to deal this problem is marking spam by all your friend circle to that profile and report to site about it.

  I downloaded and used Spybot, and I like it's uniqueness. I'm trying to download Hijack this now.
• 

  Anoop Kumar

  Did your friend used all forget password option.
  there is one option to give a new Hotmail email id if recovery email is also changed.
  Try to dig some outlook forum about it.
  
  One of my friend able to recover his Gmail account via some alternate option in which Gmail asked for account creation date, frequent mail id etc.May be Hotmail also have some kind of option like Gmail have.
• 

  Anoop Mathew

  ianoop

  Did your friend used all forget password option.
  there is one option to give a new Hotmail email id if recovery email is also changed.
  Try to dig some outlook forum about it.
  
  One of my friend able to recover his Gmail account via some alternate option in which Gmail asked for account creation date, frequent mail id etc.May be Hotmail also have some kind of option like Gmail have.

  Yes Hotmail has that kind of a system. Yet I'm not able to get in touch with my friend. I've informed few other closer friends to inform her of the situation. The hacker is still online, and I'm trying to get my friend's contact information. I've pinged her on Facebook, but if her facebook account is hacked too, then my mission would be compromised. So just awaiting her response for the time being.
• 

  Jeffrey Arulraj

  When this is over I think it would be really great if you guys can post and pin a thread which will tell us how to recover our mail id when they are hacked and also How to prevent hackers from hacking our accounts ?
  
  Will this be possible ?
• 

  Anoop Mathew

  Well, a little research on CE and guess what I found:
  
  #-Link-Snipped-#
  
  
  P.S.: We have discussed most of the answers before, just takes time to find them!