What to do if your gmail account is hacked.

It can be a real nightmare if someone hacks and takes control of your email account as it may contain confidential information like bank logins, credit card details and other sensitive data. If you are one such Internet user whose email account has been compromised, then this post will surely help you out. In this post you will find the possible ways and procedures to get back your hacked email account.

 

For Gmail:

 

It can be a big disaster if your Gmail account has been compromised as it may be associated with several services like Blogger, Analytics, Adwords, Adsense, Orkut etc. Losing access to your Gmail account means losing access to all the services associated it with too. Here is a list of possible recovery actions that you can try.

Step -1: Try resetting your password since it is the easiest way to get your account back in action. In this process Google may ask you to answer the secret question or may send the password reset details to the secondary email address associated with your compromised account. You can reset you password from the following link

Gmail Password Reset Link

If you cannot find success from the Step-1 then proceed to Step-2.

 

Step-2: Many times the hacker will change the secret question and secondary email address right after the account is compromised. This is the reason for the Password Reset process to fail. If this is the case then you need to contact the Gmail support team by filling out the account recovery form. This form will ask you to fill out several questions like

1. Email addresses of up to five frequently emailed contacts
2. Names of any 4 Labels that you may have created in your account
3. List of other services associated with your compromised account
4. Your last successful login date
5. Account created date
6. Last password that you remember and many more…

You need to fill out this form as much accurately as possible. It is obvious to forget the dates of last login, account creation and similar terms. However you need to figure out the closest possible date/answers and fill out this form. This is your last chance! The more accurate the information filled out in the recovery form, the more the chances of getting your account back. You may reach the account recovery page form the following link

Account Recovery Form

 

For Yahoo and Hotmail:

 

Unfortunately for Yahoo/Hotmail there is no second option like filling out the form or contacting the support team. All you need to do is either answer the secret questions that you have setup or reset the password using the secondary email option. 

To initiate the password reset process just click on the Forgot password link in your login page and proceed as per the screen instructions.

How to Trace an IP Address

Just go to http://www.ip2location.com/demo.aspx and enter the IP address that you want to trace in the dialog box and click on “Find Location”‘. With just a click of a button you can find the following information for any given IP address.

1. Country in which the IP is located

2. Region

3. City

4. Latitude/Longitude

5. Zip Code

6. Time Zone

7. Name of the ISP

8. Internet Speed

9. Weather Station

10. Area Code and

11. Domain name associated with the IP address.

A sample snapshot of the results from ip2location.com is given below

You can also visually trace route any IP address back to it’s location. For this just visit http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/visual-tracert/ and enter the IP you want to trace in the dialog box and hit the “Proxy Trace” button. Wait for few seconds and the visual trace route tool displays the path Internet packets traverse to reach a specified destination. Hope this helps. Please pass you comments.

Enabling/Disabling Hibernate option in windows 7/Vista

Enabling or Disabling the “Hibernate” option in Windows 7 or Vista is not as simple as it used to be in Windows XP. For Windows 7 a different approach has to be followed to accomplish the same job. In this post you will find how to enable or disable the Hibernate option in Windows 7.

Hibernation is a power saving option which was designed primarily for laptops. Unlike “sleep mode” which puts the open documents and files into the memory, hibernation puts all the open files and documents on to the hard disk and shuts down the computer without drawing even a small amount of power. Thus hibernation becomes an excellent way to save power and resume Windows back to the state where it was left off. If you really want to use this feature on Windows 7 then you need to enable this option. This can be done as follows.

1. Open the Command Prompt with “Administrator rights”. To do so, type cmd in Start menu and then hit Ctrl+Shift+Enter.

2. Now type the following command in the command prompt and hit Enter.

powercfg /hibernate on

3. Type exit and hit Enter to close the Command Prompt. Now you should see the “Hibernate” option in the Start menu. If not then perform the following steps.

A. Type Power Options in the Start menu and hit Enter.

B. In the left pane, open the link labeled “Change when the computer sleeps” and then open the link “Change advanced power settings”.

Now a small window will pop-up as shown below:

C. Now expand the Sleep tree and turn off Allow Hybrid Sleep as shown in the above screenshot.

D. Now you should see the Hibernate option in the Start menu.