Our plebian email accounts certainly wouldn’t interest Chinese hackers. But getting our email ID hacked and losing important personal information seems such a dreary proposition that we all strive to secure our email with hard-to-guess passwords. But unlike the common perception—on lines of Hollywood hits Die Hard 4.0 and Departed where compromisation of Web security leads to doom, some, who have faced hackers’ ire also have funny anecdotes to share about the incident.
At a conference on enforcement of cyber crime laws held in the city, Delhi High Court’s acting Chief Justice Madan B. Lokur narrated how his email account was hacked last year and messages were sent to his contacts that he had started a spare parts business. Needless to say the distinguished judge was hounded by people calling to check if he had really quit.
But like the Acting Chief Justice, some have faced “fishy phishing” attempts in the hands of our friends. Mehfam Wangdi, DU passout, recalls, “A tech-savvy lecturer of ours had created an email account where he disseminated notes to students and we emailed him our assignments back. But he had also provided us with the password (to open the email and download stuff). And, every evening one bright spark would delete all emails from the inbox. All those who mailed their assignments on schedule weren’t pleased as their labour was lost, but the rest of us enjoyed.”
While Wangdi’s entire batch was under the scanner, he says they could never trace the culprit.
Unlike Wangdi’s when the entire whodunit remained a mystery a few have traced the roots of their hacked emails to their near and dear ones. Prateek Raheja, a medical student, narrates the story of his classmate at college, “His (friend’s) ex-girlfriend had access to email accounts and passwords, she checked his inbox whenever he had no Internet. So, after an ugly break-up she changed the password to his primary email and sent weird messages to all his contacts.”
But gaining entry into an email account is not a very difficult job, and no, it doesn’t involve guessing the incumbent’s password. Avinash Kaul, student and an ethical hacker, says, “Our course in ethical hacking began by tracing addresses and changing the password for any email address which was to be hacked. Simple as that, I did crack a few emails and changed a few passwords.” And as a precaution, Avinash suggests, “It does cause panic initially, but you can link two email ids and use the ‘forgot password’ link to generate a new password.”