The Secure Inbox: How to Keep Your Email Private

Today, I'm going to share how hackers can get a wealth of information from our email accounts and what we can do to protect them. All of that and more ahead on The Secure Dad Podcast There's a scam that is getting a lot of attention, and it's called the pig butchering scam. Scammers want to fatten up their victims by building trust before they drop the real scam on them. It starts when you're targeted by a scammer. They'll text you under the guise that they have reached the wrong person.

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In today's digital age, email security doesn't seem that important to the average person like you and me. I don't blame you if you were not fired up about the title of this show, but when you think about all that our email address contains, like our contacts, password reset emails, and our personal data, it becomes clear that we are not alone. That protecting your email is vital to your digital security.

Our personal email addresses are gateways to a wealth of sensitive information, making them prime targets for cyber criminals. Understanding the importance of securing your email is crucial to maintaining your overall online safety. So let's talk about how our email addresses can be exploited and then what we can do to protect them.

In my opinion, the greatest threat for a hacked email account is for bad actors to intercept our password reset emails. Not just your email account, but your accounts for your online banking, social media, Amazon, healthcare providers, all of it. All of those password reset emails come through your personal email address. That's the big danger. Recovery emails are a common method for regaining access to online accounts that you've forgotten the password.

And let's face it, we've all forgotten the passwords for lots of stuff. Even if you have a password manager, sometimes one slips through the cracks. I know I have reset passwords plenty of times. However, if a hacker gains control to your primary email address, they can manipulate the recovery process to reset passwords on various accounts linked to that email. You'd be surprised at just how many of your accounts can be hijacked with just your email address and access to it.

It's actually kind of scary. So you might be wondering how hackers find these accounts. So what they do is they simply just do a search in your email for your bank, your doctor's office, your social media accounts, all those sorts of things. So what happens here is the contents of your email tells hackers where they need to go to exploit you. And many people just never think about that.

A hacked email address opens the door to a treasure trove of personal sensitive information about you and your family. Hackers can use your email address to phish your contacts and access your personal data like your cloud drive. Hackers often use compromised email addresses to send phishing emails to your contacts. This actually happened to me once years ago.

These emails disguised as legitimate from you can trick your friends, family, colleagues into sharing their own information or clicking on a malicious link. Because again, they think it's from you, not the hacker. Phishing Is much easier for scammers with a legitimate compromised email address. It's harder for our friends and family, especially our older family members to spot a scam that comes from your real email address.

Many people use their cloud storage accounts like Google Drive that comes with their email addresses. A hacker who gains access to your email can potentially access your cloud storage, compromising your personal photos, documents, and any sort of confidential files that you have stored there. Maybe you signed some paperwork and emailed it to a broker. Now they have that document and a copy of your signature.

Hackers can use the information found in your email address to commit identity theft in a bunch of different ways. They can gather a ton of personal details about you, like your full name, your date of birth, email address, and phone number from your mail account settings. They can also intercept sensitive emails containing financial statements, tax documents, and other confidential information.

With this data, hackers can impersonate you to open new credit accounts, apply for loans, and make unauthorized purchases. Additionally, they might be able to use the information to answer security questions to other accounts to gain even deeper access to your digital life. So the information in your email can lead to hacking of your other accounts pretty easily.

Now that we understand some of the threats, let's now take a look at how we can be proactive to protect our email addresses. One of the most fundamental security tips for protecting your email account is using strong, unique passwords. Do not use the same password that you have used forever. That's not good. Maybe you're using an old email address from 10 years ago, and you've only updated the password once. That's not good. This is your wake up call.

Or perhaps you think that you're not important and no one will ever want to Hack your email. So your password is password 1234 They know that one. That's a very common one That's the one that they're gonna try like first. So just be aware either way. You're gonna need to make some changes. A strong password significantly reduces the likelihood of unauthorized access to your accounts. It should be unique for every single account to prevent a domino effect if one of your accounts is compromised.

So if your, your password is password one, two, three, four for, you know, Gmail, your bank account, logging on to even your work email address. Well, that's bad because they're just going to copy it over and over again and then access all of your data with just that one password that you've set up. And you may be thinking that it's hard enough to think of these unique passwords, let alone remember them, though. This is where a password manager can be helpful.

Password managers like Bitwarden or NordPass will help you create and manage all of your passwords. These services will generate passwords of letters and numbers and even use whole words. They use dashes and commas, special characters, all this sort of cool stuff. Then they can save your credentials for either faster logins. Just be sure to create a strong master password for that service.

Cause if you don't and you don't remember it, then even they can't help you and you're going to have to reset all of your passwords and that'll become a whole lot of password reset emails that come to your address, which is dangerous as we've already talked about. For those of you who are long time listeners, you know that in the past I haven't really trusted password managers because I had a bad experience with one a few years ago.

Well, I've recently started using one and I really like it and it's been very helpful. So I think my experience in the past was just one of these one off situations. And so I am using a password manager now and I highly recommend that everybody else use them. Another way to secure your email address, and really any other account, is to enable two factor authentication. This adds an extra layer of security to your email accounts, making it much harder for hackers to gain access.

Two factor authentication, which is called 2FA, requires two forms of verification before granting access to an account. Something you know, like a password, and then something that you have, like a smartphone app. or a security token. Yes, two factor authentication is a pain, and it does slow you down, but trust me, it is worth it. I do this multiple times every day. You can always remove your email address from the internet so the bad guys can't find it, and DeleteMe can help you with that.

They can get your personal information off of data broker sites, and make it harder for just anybody to outright buy your information. DeleteMe can remove data like your email address, home address, birthday, photos, social media handles, marital status, property value, and a whole lot more. A lot of stuff that you and I just don't think about. Can you imagine how easy it is for scammers to pretend to be you with all of that information, plus access to your email address?

That's a really bad scenario. Personally, I have been a customer of DeleteMe since 2018 and I highly recommend their services. You can learn more about them at JoinDeleteMe.com/Dad. I hope by now you see that email security, is a crucial aspect of protecting your personal information online. By following key security tips, such as using strong passwords, enabling two factor authentication and utilizing services like DeleteMe.

You can significantly improve your email security and safeguard your sensitive information. Remember staying vigilant and proactive about your email security practices can go a long way and preventing cyber attacks and protecting your identity.

That's everything that I have for today's episode. Thank you, friend, for joining me. Take back your privacy and personal data with help from DeleteMe. Get 20% off our privacy plan when using the code DAD at checkout. There's a link for you in today's show notes. Fortify your home with FlipLock. For more, go to FlipLok.com and use the discount code SECUREDAD to get 20 % off your entire order.

If you'd like for your child to have a smartphone, but not access to the entire internet, You might want to consider a Troomi phone. Use code THESECUREDAD at checkout for $50 off a phone of your choice. My family uses a Troomi phone all the time. For more from The Secure Dad, consider subscribing to the official Secure Dad YouTube channel. There you can watch all of my interviews and find exclusive content. Just search for The Secure Dad the next time you're on YouTube.

I'm Andy Murphy reminding you that our safety is our own responsibility.