05.04.07

Has My Webmail Been Hacked?

Posted in IT, Security at 12:21 am by Tyler Reguly

Jeremiah Grossman has an interesting post up over on his blog titled, "How to check if your WebMail account has been hacked." The post discusses using an older concept of "Web Bugs" to monitor your web-based email account to see if it has been accessed. This is (or was), if I recall correct, one of the methods used by ReadNotify to determine if a recipient had read an email you sent them.

It really is an interesting concept and it's not a bad idea to employ the method... The problem, not everyone has access to their own server where they can set this up. Jeremiah's suggestions of getting free hosting or using the account that comes with your internet connect (since most include a small web site these days) is reasonable, but these accounts don't always include access to logs.

After thinking about this, I decided to play around with a simple method of automating the image creation so that images on a single server, for multiple people, and in a way that the images would be random and difficult to guess. I've come up with what I believe is a suitable method and I've decided to make it available here. Unfortunately I don't have a means for people to easily access my logs. So for now, if anyone wants to make use of it for lack of a better option, feel free to do so and contact me if you suspect your account as been accessed... I'll check my logs for the name of the file generated for you. In the future I hope to implement a system that will allow users to log in and check all access to that email, we'll see if anyone tries it this way and if the demand is worth the effort.

In the mean time if you want to use the simple method I came up with, simply visit this page and generate yourself an image.

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