Back at it with another story! Before we dive in, grab your coffee and some cookies because we’re about to kick things off. In this tale, I’ll spill the tea on how to take over your hacked Gmail account. Let’s get this show on the road!
Story
I remember that day vividly. It was around 8:15 in the morning. I was just sitting with my friend, enjoying our breakfast when I received an email from PayPal. It was a request for $50 from my other friend. I was taken aback because it was an unusual activity. That’s when I realized my friend’s account had been hacked.
As you can see, the hacker asked for 50 bucks, with “Please” as his description, lol, it's so classic, I'm not using English as my primary language, so that's became more sus.
Situation
After got the email, I contacted my other friend and asked if it was from her, but then she told me that it wasn't from her, she told me that someone’s tried to log in to her Paypal account, Instagram account, TikTok, Microsoft, and Facebook account, she also trying to recover her accounts but she doesn't have the access to her gmail anymore, sadly the hacker already changed her Gmail password and setting a new device using my friend’s Gmail.
In this situation we can't do much, the timeline was too far since she got hacked, the last email she got in her gmail was around 07:15 and now it is 08:30, until this, we are losing hope.
the hacker already set up my friend’s Gmail on his phone and changed the password, as we can see, the hacker is from Nigeria, for a second I thought he was using a VPN, but in the end, I knew the hacker didn't use VPN.
Reclaimed day
one week after this incident, my friend told me that, she got a message from the hacker via “find my device”, there was a message saying that she should contact the hacker via telegram.
After she told me that, I made another attempt to recover her account. Here’s what I did:
I tried to sync the Gmail data several times on her primary phone, knowing that Gmail saves trusted devices and usual network identities. In the first few attempts, I encountered errors syncing the data. However, I persisted and continued trying until Gmail recognized the device as trusted but couldn’t sync the data. After a few more attempts, Gmail finally asked for confirmation that it was a safe and trusted device. Then, I was able to change the password from her phone and set up two-factor authentication for Gmail and other social accounts also logging out from all devices. Finally, I successfully regained access to her account.
After that, I’m trying to trace back the hacker. I go to timeline.google.com(logged as my friend's Gmail account) to check if there is data about the phone’s location. And yes, I found something interesting there. You can see it here, hacker’s timeline.
I attempted to access this location using Google Maps, but unfortunately, there is no data available, so we can’t dive deeper to determine the location.
Tips
- Log in from your main phone since Google saves your trusted device information, remember phone is more trusted than a laptop/PC.
- If your Gmail account is stuck on your phone after being hacked and you can’t receive any emails, that’s a good sign. Give it about 1 week, and try to re-sync your data to recover your account. You can attempt it on the first day, but if it’s not successful, wait about 1 week, then try again.
How to prevent
- Turn on 2FA for your social media accounts.
- Check your email to know that maybe your account using that email has been hacked
https://haveibeenpwned.com/ - Check how strong your password is via https://www.passwordmonster.com/
