Most users don’t even notice if their accounts are hacked

Somehow I am not the least bit surprised by this little tidbit of news but it seems that according to a recent report from Commtouch finds that only bout a third of users even notice if their Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, or even Facebook accounts have been hacked. The other little kicker is that the only reason that they probably know about the hack is because a friend told them.

Security companies like Eset are finding that in this day and age of Facebook and Twitter that social engineering is playing an even larger role in hacking accounts than in the past. Today the attacks are much more sophisticated and sequential.

This means that hacking your email account may only be the beginning of a much deeper hacking attack which due to the common practice of using the username/password combination across many services makes it easier to hack social accounts as well.

Where once it might have been only about getting email access it now is the collection of Facebook accounts, Twitter identifications, and gaming site log-ins.

In the report titled: The State of Hacked Accounts, it was found that one in eight hijacked accounts were used for phoney distress scams and more than half were used to send spam.

They also found that of the 34% who knew their accounts had been attacked, 15% claimed a WiFi connection, 15% clicked on email-based malware, and 15% said it was due to a Facebook scam link.