How do hackers benefit from your email address without the password?
What Hackers Can Do If They Know Your Email
1- Phishing attacks
Phishing is the most common form of cybercrime, with hackers around the world sending over 3.4 billion phishing emails every day, the vast majority of which are sent via email. Phishing attacks are a key stepping stone for cybercriminals and hackers to gain access to more sensitive data such as passwords, application credentials, and bank and credit card credentials.
Statistics say that nearly 36% of hacking operations around the world are carried out through phishing attacks .
Impersonation messages are considered one of the most popular tricks used in phishing attacks, where hackers send their victims emails that appear to be issued by a legitimate entity that enjoys high reliability, such as government agencies, banking institutions, international organizations, or a famous social networking site such as Facebook, or an e- commerce site such as Amazon, and ask the victims to disclose some of the most sensitive personal data and information or ask them to click on a fake link and log in to their accounts on those platforms, so that the user eventually finds himself the victim of a carefully prepared trap to steal his accounts.
The damage caused by phishing doesn’t stop at stealing the account you provided the attacker with credentials for. Cyber attackers often use that data to access your accounts on other apps and platforms, taking advantage of the fact that most people tend to repeatedly use the same password for a number of their accounts and bank cards at the same time.
Therefore, being careful and not sharing your email address and other credentials with others and avoiding clicking on any untrusted links received via email is the first line of defense against phishing attacks, in addition to following other security measures such as activating account login using two-factor authentication methods , and using passkeys instead of passwords, which makes it difficult for a hacker to hack accounts unless he has access to the device you are using to log in.
To ensure the security of your accounts, always remember to only log in to your account through the official legitimate website, and not through any link attached to a text message or email.
2- Disclosure of personal information
An email address alone can also be useful to cyber attackers to help them track people’s online activities and learn more about their personal lives. Hackers take advantage of the fact that most people tend to use a single email address for multiple accounts on different apps, platforms and websites.
If someone knows your email address, they can use a reverse email lookup tool to find your accounts on different services, websites and apps that use the same email address, such as social media sites and networks, and then access a huge amount of personal information about you, such as your full name, date of birth, phone number, home address, profession, place of work and even some other information about your family life.
The attacker can use the personal information he has obtained to serve several criminal goals, such as trying to blackmail you if you do not want to disclose some of this information to certain parties, or stalking you in the real world.
It may also harm those around you if the hacker uses this information in social engineering attacks, so you must be careful and avoid logging into untrusted sites and forums using your primary email address, in addition to being as careful as possible and not sharing your personal information with others on the Internet.
3- Impersonating you
Based on the previous point, someone who has your email address and knows enough information about you can easily pretend to be you and communicate with people around you after creating a fake email account that resembles your email address and uses the same personal data as you.
A common phishing method involves a cyber attacker impersonating someone you know and trust, such as a friend or relative, in order to convince you to take some action, such as giving them money, disclosing personal information, clicking on a malicious link, or allowing them to access restricted systems. This type of hacking, where a hacker impersonates some victims in order to trick other victims, is known as social engineering.
Social engineering attacks often cause malware and viruses to spread among a large number of systems and users. Malware and viruses can, in turn, block and disable some systems and services, and can also leak data of individuals and companies. Even the largest companies in the world have suffered huge losses in recent years due to this type of attack.
4- Sign up for unwanted services
If you open the Spam box in your email, you will likely find a lot of messages and notifications from websites and platforms that you do not remember logging in to or visiting before. Here is one of the most famous tricks that uses the email addresses of some web users, which aims to increase the number of visitors to some websites, forums and subscribers to news services.
If someone is able to know your email address, they can simply use it to subscribe to forums and some websites such as various news sites, which usually do not require confirmation of the email address to subscribe to them and receive updates and notifications from them, and thus they can bring to their site or forum more visitors and subscribers who have not visited the site before and only knew about it through those notifications received in their email.
In most cases, these subscriptions do not cause serious harm. For example, they will not force you to subscribe to e-commerce sites or paid services without your knowledge. All services, applications, and sites that involve financial transactions require subscribers to confirm their email address first before activating the subscription.
However, despite their limited harm, receiving messages and notifications from these unknown sites and forums is still very annoying, and may accumulate over time to exhaust the free storage capacity available to you on the devices and cloud services that you use to save and synchronize your data online.
Thanks to the great advancements in cybersecurity strategies used by email service providers, services like Gmail, Yahoomail, Outlook, and others are now able to filter incoming emails, detect spam messages, and put them in a dedicated list, which has helped reduce the annoyance of those messages, but some of them can still find their way into your inbox and lead you to those suspicious sites and services.
5- Hacking accounts
Most people currently use single-factor authentication for their accounts on websites, platforms, and various online services, meaning that logging into these accounts requires entering credentials consisting of only a username or email in addition to a password.
What makes matters worse is that some people also do not use strong enough passwords to secure their accounts, making it easy for hackers who have their email addresses and know a lot of information about the account owner to guess the password and hack the account.
Some dark web sites also offer huge libraries of millions of email addresses and passwords leaked during mass hacking attacks on major companies, and this data is sold by professional hackers.
This account hacking process can lead to the hacking of other accounts for which the victim uses the same initial credentials. Account hacking in general is a very long-term risk, as anyone who can log in to an email account may access other more sensitive data and information such as payment information and credit card information.
Account hacking can be avoided by following adequate security measures to protect your email account and other accounts, such as activating multi-factor authentication methods , setting a unique password for each account, using passkeys instead of just passwords, and in addition to all of this, avoiding leaving your email address available to others.
There are many things that others can do with your email address alone, and to avoid misuse of your email address, try not to include any personal information in your email address, such as your full name, date of birth, or country of residence.
Avoid leaving your email address visible and accessible to others on social media sites and networks.
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You should also not share your primary email with anyone or provide it to parties that are not reliable enough. Instead, you can use several email accounts, dedicating one of them to each purpose separately. This limits the possibility of hackers accessing all your personal information through your email address.
Always remember to use strong antivirus software on your devices, avoid clicking on links sent to you via emails, and check your bank accounts and credit cards from time to time to ensure that no payments, purchases, or financial transactions have been made without your knowledge. You can also use a dark web monitoring service, such as Identity Guard , which will alert you if your information is included in leaked or sold data on dark web sites.