Does Hotmail sniff emails

There are a lot of stories about information being taken from the internet. People are always hearing news about hackers taking passwords, images, financial information, et cetera from personal emails and other data being sent on the internet. This can be a very scary thought. Many people wonder if their email is safe from sniffers.

What is a sniffer

A sniffer is a device and/or program that is able to monitor data that is traveling over a network. There are some legitimate reasons to use a sniffer such as network management. Sniffers can be used to get valuable information such as passwords and user IDs. MSN Hotmail Password Recovery can be considered a sort of sniffer program. But there are of course also unauthorized sniffers. These sniffers are used to steal information from off a network and can be very dangerous to network security. The reason that sniffer programs or devices are dangerous to network security is because they are almost impossible to detect and can be placed just about anywhere. Sniffers copy the information and data without making a change to the original contents. Sniffer programs and devices are commonly used among hackers.

How to keep your Hotmail emails safe from sniffing

One way to keep your Hotmail emails safe from sniffing is by having a SSH or a Secure Shell. If a person has SSH access to their mail server it can help keep their emails safe from sniffing. For a person to get their SSH working they needs to go to the tool called PuTTY. Next they should get the Zip file which contains all the tools since they will need most of them. One of the tools they will be using is called "plink." They will need to run "plink-v-L 110:mailserver:110-L 25: mailserver:25 -2you@mailserver-N_pw yourpassword in the command shell. "you@mailserver" is the person's email log in account name at their mailserver, and "pwyourpassword" is the password that the person has for their SSH log in name. Once plink is running the person should leave it connected and running.

After these steps to get plink up and running, they should change the POP3 and SMTP servers to "localhost" in their email client. What will happen next is that when the person reloads their email, it will try to, for instance, fetch POP3 mail from the "localhost, port110" but since plink is "listening" to port110 on the person's machine, it will encrypt the data. After it encrypts the data it will send it to the SSH server which is running on the mail server. The SSH server then decrypts the data and will forward it to the port110 on the actual mail server.

Another way for a person to keep their Hotmail emails safe

Since information is sent over the network by emails, web pates, and even chat programs in the format of plain text it is easy for hackers (sniffers) to see it. But if a person encrypts the data it will protect it against sniffing. Using a Secure Socket Layer (SSL), which are protected websites, can keep a person's data safe as it travels. There are other programs that can be downloaded off the internet that can encrypt a person's email messages, passwords, and chats.Downloading and installing one of these programs can keep passwords safe and protect the people and their personal information.