Is your Email Safe?

I landed up on an archived Article in Times of India (Dtd 29/Nov/2009); Is your email safe??

Read the article out of curiosity and thought would be an informative post on TooStep

How many of us know or follow them???

Is your email safe?

Keep your vulnerable personal data secure from grubby hackers

--- By Kavita Kukday-Deb

After being haunted for over a month on email, Maitryee Deshpande, a college student from Mumbai, decided to get to the bottom of who exactly her email stalker was. “I actually emailed him back asking him how he knew me and what he wanted. And the answer really shocked me.”

It turned out that her stalker was actually someone who had never seen or even heard of her. “He had just picked my email id from a public computer at a cybercafé which I had forgotten to
erase.”

Deshpande was lucky that her stalker turned out to be a harmless guy looking for some friendship, but not everyone gets that lucky. With emails turning into your identity online where all kinds of sensitive data, including banking and health changes hands, it’s best not to be cavalier about them. Agreed, there is not a whole lot you can do with free accounts, but here are a few tricks that will keep you at an arm’s length from danger.

Security on public computers

First off, let’s tackle the mistake that Deshpande made. It’s important to remember that online email services keep users logged on for a very long time — from a few days to even weeks — after you close the browser. Which means, it’s a good idea to hit the logout button as soon as you are done checking your mail, especially if you are working from a public computer such as a cybercafé.

Another basic security routine is to wipe off browser history. This way you will make
sure that the computer no longer has your email ID, which can be used like in Deshpande’s case.

Turn up Gmail security

Google’s email service normally works on an HTTP connection. This is a nonsecure mode of communication. Simply put, it will open up possibilities for hackers to steal your password without much ado. But to fix the problem, all you have to do is to force Gmail to use Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS). This mode will make sure to encrypt all of your mail using HTTPS. By default, though, this mode is turned off. To turn it back on go to the ‘Settings’ tab on the top right corner of your screen.

Next click on the ‘General Settings’ tab and scroll down to an option called the ‘Browser Connection’. Once done, you can simply switch the radio button to ‘Always use HTTPS’ and save your settings. This will force Gmail to encrypt your entire email session always and all the time.

Hotmail secure mode

Moving on the Microsoft’s Windows Live and Hotmail services, these will encrypt your sign-on session, but you have to take steps to make it secure since Hotmail will not automatically ask you to sign on with an HTTPS communication. What they do instead, is to make a secure request (via HTTPS) in the background once you enter your password and hit the submit button. This is they call ‘standard security’.

However, you can secure even the initial exchange by simply switching to an option called ‘Enhanced Security’. To opt for the secure mode of signing in you can click on the link that says ‘Use enhanced security.’

This will bring you to a fully encrypted page. The service will remember this preference, bringing you the secure page every time you sign in.

I have started using this. I am sure, many of Non-IT persons like me, on an average, must not be using this, unless they are aware of it