Anatomy of compromising email accounts

Click! You open an email and you are hacked. Your password reaches the hacker while you read the contents of the innocuous looking email. With hacking on an upward spiral, hacking of an email account occurs everywhere. An email account becomes a lucrative proposition if it is deployed on a domain which has critical importance in terms of data, both from a commercial perspective and espionage. This brings us to the vital question? How easy is it to compromise an email account? Despite the encryption, email accounts are getting compromised. This publication aims to discuss the ways in which emails can be compromised. This study is an examination of the analysis found in the ways adopted by hackers/attackers at various levels to gain access to an email account. This work intends to increase the understanding and awareness of the internet user across the globe and discuss plausible countermeasures at the users level as well. This conceptual paper will contribute to future research on similar topics.