What are the 3 most used methods by hackers to hijack your Google account (and how to protect yourself)

Suffering computer attacks is the order of the day: according to Google, more than 15% of Internet users have reported experiencing the theft of their email accounts or social networks.
And many others never report it.
"However, despite being a family affair, there is little research on the motives behind the kidnappings," explained Kurt Thomas and Angelika Moscicki, security researchers at the technology giant.
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Together with the University of California at Berkeley, USA, the king of internet searches prepared a report in which he analyzed the preferred techniques of cybercriminals when attacking their users.Between March 2016 and March 2017, they followed the steps of several hackers to observe how they stole passwords and other sensitive data.
Google says they put what they learned into practice to avoid the abuse of 67 million vulnerable accounts. Through these accounts, your customers not only access Gmail, but also other services, such as YouTube and Blogger.
According to Google, hackers mainly use three techniques "that pose a risk to all online account services", and not only for those of your company.
We tell you what they are.
1. Phishing
The study authors identified 12.4 million account credentials that were stolen using a technique known as phishing.
That computer thermal comes from the English word that in Spanish is translated as "fishing" and refers to the identity theft by scammers to obtain personal data of users.
The goal can vary from user names and passwords, to bank details and access accounts to other online services.
The "fishermen" access the information using false messages as "bait" for their victims, pretending to be other people or entities through emails, messages or phone calls.
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"A password is not enough to access Google, so more sophisticated hackers tried to gather sensitive data that we could ask to verify the user's authenticity, such as the IP address and location, the phone number or the model of the device," he says. Thomas.
"Analyzing the risk for users, we conclude that phishing is the biggest threat."
2. Keyloggers
The second threat is the keyloggers, a type of programs that allow you to record every typing we make on the computer or everything we see through the screen and send it to an external server.
This type of digital scam occurs frequently in places of public connection, such as cybercafés. It is usually part of major infections through malware (malicious programs).
"Thanks to this program, criminals can steal a large volume of confidential information without the victim being aware of it," they explain in the blog of the Russian computer security company Kaspersky Lab.
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Google identified 788,000 potential victims of this scam during the year its investigation lasted.
Computer criminals distribute these programs through computer worms and other types of Trojans (computer viruses).
A simple signal to detect this type of infection is when typing we observe a double tilde ('').
3. Security breaches
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Image caption
In the case of security breaches, computer criminals steal business data.
The third way that hackers use is, according to Google, the security breaches in third-party services. In those cases, cybercriminals steal the databases of a company.
The company identified 1,900 million data product of these failures and later verified if some of those commercialized data were used to access Gmail accounts and other services.
And they concluded that 7% of victims of this type of data theft run the risk of cybercriminals entering their Google account through this system.
This is what happened to Yahoo in August 2013, when it suffered a massive hack, as acknowledged at the end of last year.
Yahoo recognizes that it suffered a "hack" that affected 1,000 million user accounts
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HOW TO PROTECT YOU?
Google security specialists say there are new alerts to warn of dangerous practices to prevent users from clicking suspicious links. Loans attention.
They also monitor suspicious attempts to access the account from other devices or locations different from the usual ones. When that happens, they send a message to "verify" if it's you. This allows "two-step verification", which would reinforce security.
Another option is to report suspicious accounts through Gmail to prevent further damage.
You can use a Chrome tool called Smart Lock to manage passwords.
Finally, you can visit the Google website of "Security review", in the following link.