Save your GMail inbox from getting hacked!

In India, there are not many free Wi-Fi spots however, it has happened to my friend that he attended one of the un-conference and some hacker had setup an ad-hoc connection pretending as if it’s the wi-fi spot and because of which his account got hacked.

Something similar was showcased by Robert Graham at BlackHat conference 2007. He made use of some tools which had created himself and hijacked the session IDs and cookies of the Gmail account and logged into the Gmail account without any trouble.

This can be easily avoided if you use secure interface of Gmail (HTTPS) however, Gmail by default loads itself in the normal mode but allows users to force the SSL mode but manually.

Thanks to good ol’ greasemonkey and the scripts provided by various users, you can force the SSL mode automatically. In order to achieve this, follow these steps :

1. Install Firefox.
2. Install Greasemonkey extension.
3. Install Google Services in HTTPS script.

Done! Now you won’t have the fear of falling under those cheap tricks applied by hackers.

Photo Credit : Kansir