Employee’s email accounts are full of valuable information to hackers. A hacker that accesses your employee’s email inbox will easily connect to services or online accounts that their email was used as a login. The information a hacker can access includes financial services, such as bank accounts or credit cards, or sensitive employee and customer information.
Once a hacker has accessed your email, they can access a lot more information. Below are seven things hackers can do with employees stolen email addresses:
1. Send Emails from Employees Address
This is an obvious thing that hikers can do with an employee’s email address, and it can cause quite a commotion. Once hackers have an employee’s email address, they can use it to target people by sending out email blasts to everyone in your contact list. Cybercriminals can forge sender addresses, and they don’t require a password to do this.
2. Send Phishing Emails
Hackers are limited in what they can do with just an email address, but they won’t stop just there. Hackers will employ a few methods to access employee’s passwords, the most common being phishing. This is an email from a trusted source that is a disguise to look legitimate and is designed to trick employees into logging in. Hackers will create a legitimate-sounding email that appears to be sent from a service such as eBay, Paypal, Amazon, or another popular service. Links in the phishing email will direct users to a purposefully built website that looks identical to the real benefit. If an employee clicks the link and uses the illegitimate link, hackers can get their email and password information.
3. Access Online Accounts
Emails tend to double as logins for many social account sites and Google Docs. Typically internet users tend to use the same passwords for all of their accounts online. Even if employees use different passwords, they can hit the “forgot password” button and create a new password if a hacker has access to their email account. Then a cybercriminal has access to all of their online accounts.
4. Access Personal Information
Once a hacker has access to an employee’s personal information, they can access any other accounts and have lots of information right at their fingertips. They can use an email to access employee’s responsibilities and who other employees are. If a hacker has access to employee’s personal information, they potentially could stalk employees.
5. Steal Financial Information
It can become very problematic if hackers find credit cards, banking accounts, or debit card information for your company. Once a hacker has access to your financial information, they can use your money. This can be devastating to company finances and personal credit scores. Hackers can use your credit card details, open bank accounts, and take out loans on your business or personal information.
6. Blackmail
Hackers can use personal information to ruin or threaten to destroy your employees or company, especially if hackers find information that you would not want to be shared publicly. Hackers can use this access to spy and review personal emails.
7. Steal Identity
Once hackers have employees’ email, they can access personally identifiable information and steal employees’ identities. If hackers get info, such as social security numbers or credit card information, it is easy for a hacker to obtain someone’s identity.
What to do if an Employee’s Email has been Hacked
If your employees are starting to notice strange online activity, there are ways to get ahead of it before a hacker gets too much information. If an employee’s email is sending out spam emails, change their password immediately. Contacts should also be made aware of ignoring emails coming from the employee right now.
In Conclusion
Hopefully, a hacker will never access employee’s emails, and your business won’t encounter any of these problems. Still, there are particular measures you can take, such as a company password manager to safeguard against an email hack.