We are very much aware of email hacking these days. Hackers stealing email passwords, getting into mailboxes, zooming in and stealing important information. It is not just the spam email we have to watch for. This could be quite risky if you are the victim, because by doing so, the hackers can find out lots of personal information about you, your family, financial or career related information that you have probably shared with your near, dear or trusted ones through email, and you have no intention to share it with an unknown person that you don’t trust.
Sometimes it is also the case that your email was not hacked but you feel like it, because you experience some strange behavior of the system like – you can’t find an old email or you see an email “marked as read” that you never read!
Well, if you want to do a little investigation to find out if someone hacked your email, you can do that now in Gmail or Yahoo mail. You are probably aware by now that we all use a unique IP address when we connect to the internet. These IP addresses are now country specific, meaning if you live in Australia, your IP address will have a different numbering scheme than someone living in England. Therefore, if someone has hacked your Gmail account sitting in another country, you will be able to find that out easily. If the hacker is doing his job sitting in the same country, still you might be able to trace it with few additional steps stated below.
How to See if Your Yahoo Email Account Has Been Hacked
- Login to yahoo mail and on the top left corner of your screen you will see your profile name. Click on the little triangular menu pointer right next to your profile name and select the option “account Info”.
- Here you will be asked to enter your password. After entering password you will come to the next screen where there is several account related information that you can change or modify. Here you will see “sign-in and security” section and under that section you will see “view your recent sign-in activity”. Click on that option and another screen as shown in image 3 will launch giving you all the details of the account activity of the last few days.
- Here on this screen you can see the events and also the IP addresses that were used to log into your account. There are lot more information you will see on this screen that I have truncated in the above image to make the texts clearly visible. These IP addresses are actually the addresses that were used while logging into this email account at different times. Since the IP address we use keeps changing with time, we see so many of them listed here. But all these addresses should definitely belong to you and your ISP. If you can identify one of these addresses are not yours, then you know there was an intruder. Let’s try with the location first. On the IP address option tab as shown by the arrow key in the above image, change it to “location” by clicking on the downwards triangle. All the IP addresses will be changed to their corresponding location – country. This will give you the idea if all those locations are appropriate in terms of how you logged in to your account. For example, if you didn’t leave Australia for the last few days, then all these locations should be marked as “Australia”. But if you have left for the weekend and went to another country and logged in to your account from there, then for those corresponding days location will be different. Based on this logic, if you never left Australia and you see one instance there that says “China” for example, you know something is wrong.
- If you cannot detect any wrong doing from the location information and still you are not convinced, switch the location option back to “IP Address”. Check the 2nd number from the left “234” in my case. Check if this number is the same in all the IP addresses in the list. If you see there is one address for which this number is different, more likely you have come close to catching the intruder.
- Note down this IP address you have identified (like 3xx.2xx.5x.1x) and run a check on the following website to whom this address belongs to. Go to this web site http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip-lookupand you will see lookup IP address box as shown in the image 4 below.
- Enter the IP address in the box and hit “lookup IP Address”. This will give you the information on which ISP this IP address is registered with. If your ISP is different than the name of the ISP that will come out from this lookup trace, then you have found the host ISP the hacker belongs to. Now you know what to do! Or just contact that ISP for more information on the person who entered into your email account.
How To See if Your Gmail Account Has Been Hacked
Just login to Gmail and towards the bottom of your screen (the first screen after you login to Gmail), you will see an option called “details” as shown in image 5 below. This will launch almost a same type of pop up screen as we have seen for Yahoo with IP address list and location table. You just have to follow the same check and trace principle as we have illustrated above.
This account activity will pop up.
You can also visit this link https://security.google.com/settings/security/activity?pli=1 to see who has accessed your entire Google account.
It is also worth mentioning here that, to protect your email from getting hacked, it is always better to change passwords frequently and use passwords that are difficult to break. You can protect your accounts using multi layer security. In addition, when you enter password, system will often ask if you want to save the password for next time you login so that you don’t have to type it in again. It is always better not to go for that option and save your password; this will make the job lot easier for the Hacker.
Kim says
August 22, 2013 at 5:51 pmI friend thinks her email account has been compromised as some email she has been saving has recently disappeared; not everything just a few that have to do with a certain situation. Also, when you try to Reply to her email it comes back as undeliverable. If you check the notice it shows that an additional character has been added to her email address. Can someone be monitoring her email? (it’s a personal laptop accessed from home)
Mitz says
July 9, 2013 at 10:44 amDo you mean this page we are on now? I cannot see the error?
brigit says
July 7, 2013 at 10:32 pmnot sure which version of IE or Yahoo your using but after spending 45 mins and entering my password a dozen times I still cant find the “IP” tab(?) to check this.
my machine is up to date on everything including(sadly) the newest “improved” Yahoo format. I followed everything you said to do but it isn’t there in this Yahoo format…..nothing about it is the same as what you describe! any hints on what to try next?
Mitz says
July 9, 2013 at 10:45 amYou need to go to your account info then find “sign-in and security” section and under that section you will see “view your recent sign-in activity”. Click on that option and another screen as shown in image 3 will launch giving you all the details of the account activity of the last few days. There you can change the location option in the drop down menu to IP address.
peter says
June 4, 2013 at 7:03 pmI can’t remember my password couldn’t. Get the code to find it then it was sent to yahoo acct from 1999 don’t know that password then it says it don’t exist now well then how did they send a code to an accct that’s no longer. Then Iiam told iam hacked so i call # on line & can’t get thru to solve this
Ruwandi says
May 23, 2013 at 4:16 pmHi..! these days I was confused because my Google talk visibility is not under my control .Sometimes it makes me visible even when I`m in invisible mode.sometimes it `s in idle mode,but every time it doesn`t happens in the same way .some times it doesn`t some times it does .some times it `s just for 2 or 3 minutes but some times it keeps longer .
In these occassions it shaws ” Oops! You are not invisible because you’re logged into Google Talk from another client, device, or location that doesn’t support invisibility. ”
At the end of my account it shaws “Currently being used in other location”.Could you please tell me whether I`m hacked or is it a virous .(but nothing confused with spam trash box & nothing abuseful happened )
Thanks
Ruwandi
Mitz says
May 24, 2013 at 10:49 amYes this can mean that someone is logged into your account and it could also mean that you have stayed logged in on another device. So it could be you or someone else. You can check the IP addresses to see if anything looks familiar. You can go and google “whats my IP” to see your IP address. There should also be an option somewhere to log all sessions out..
Mitz says
July 9, 2013 at 10:52 amHi there’
I think this has something to do with you still be logged into Google hangouts.. Go there and log out. If that does not work then try logging out of other Google products or apps. 🙂
Chris says
October 4, 2012 at 2:47 amIf your with Gmail, why not turn on that extra layer of protection that is now available: and confirmation code. Some of you may ask “what’s that?”, well there is an option to only allow access to your account by typing in a verification code sent to your mobile. Provided that you have control of your account & confirm the mobile number is yours in the account settings, you will be fine.
Another thing I suggest with this option is that when you are asked you if you want to “trust this computer” in future, I suggest you do not use this option. That way, you will always require the verification and as well as your account password.
I hope this helps some of you!
Mitz says
October 14, 2012 at 3:42 amGreat tips Chris! Thanks for sharing!
Kyle says
September 30, 2012 at 4:54 am>If your ISP is different than the name of the ISP that will come out from this lookup trace, then you have found the host ISP the hacker belongs to. Now you know what to do! Or just contact that ISP for more information on the person who entered into your email account.
Yeah, except no ISP would ever give that information out. You would need a court ordered. And since anyone can just use their iPod to piggyback on all of the passwordless routers that are beaming out their internet connection to the world, good luck getting a warrant.
About the only thing you can do is change your password and delete the easy to guess security questions they answered. Yahoo is the worst when it comes to security questions. Make of first car owned? Do you know how many makes there are of cars? Not that many.
In general you should never use a security question unless the information can not be guessed at all and exists only in your head, and no one else knows it.
Name of your first pet or library card number are easy to get.
The security question is the equivalant to the password and the passwords to all the accounts that email is attached to. So imagine instead of username and password, it said username and ‘name of best man at wedding’. The strength of the password becomes useless.
>In addition, when you enter password, system will often ask if you want to save the password for next time you login so that you don’t have to type it in again. It is always better not to go for that option and save your password; this will make the job lot easier for the Hacker.
You mean harder, right? In any case this is only an issues if the hacker has direct access to your computer. And if that’s the case, they could put a keylogger on your computer or any number of other things.
Mitz says
October 2, 2012 at 12:25 am1. Why not try contacting your ISP..Any help is good. I have done this with similar matters and they have checked things out for me and notified other companies of the offending IP.
2. I can see how the saving password can work both ways.. Yes a keylogger can record the keystrokes also. So your it all goes back to strong passwords and a great firewall on your computer in the first place..:)
Cherish says
January 26, 2013 at 11:25 amGmail sends out an email to let you know your account has been (or someone tried too) hacked. But what do you do then? So I have an IP address, and a location. Oooh, my ex lives in that area. Is there a way I can tell if it’s him? (So much easier to call him on the phone and tell him to bugger off then get all paranoid about hackers trying to find out how much I can buy MY viagra for).
Peter Lee says
September 30, 2012 at 4:42 amThis is very helpful indeed. I never thought someone would actually wanted to hack an email account until mine got hacked once. Since then, I always practice using strong passwords as well as changing my password regularly.
suresh says
September 24, 2012 at 9:03 amThanks for letting me know this happened Yahoo, instead of just locking me out of my account and making me wonder why I couldn’t get in. Some “user” apology!
richa says
September 21, 2012 at 7:48 amThese are very important steeps you have mentioned here. I always auto save my password to save me from the trouble of typing it each time but I will surely not do it now after reading this post. I have changed my password 4 times in 2 months now as my account did not use to open with auto password, surely it must be hacked. Thanks for this informative share.