Recently many reports of Google Adwords accounts being hacked have surfaced. As soon as hackers get into your account, they start their own campaigns and set the CPC to the maximum to ensure their ads appear on top of search results. The campaigns keep running till they catch your attention or when you see your credit card bills. If you fail to notice them on time then it may result in huge losses.
In one of the recent incident, hacker broke into a Google Adwords account, created a campaign and spent 6100 British Pound within 10 hours on a campaign. In another case, the account holder was a bit lucky, he logged in the account and found one alien campaign running and noticed 80 British Pound had been spent on the campaign with each CPC set to around 3.5 British Pound. It's difficult to say how exactly the Google Adwords accounts are being hacked since there are multiple ways in whihc hackers can break into your account, be it Google Adwords or could be your bank account. Some suggest its being done using some malware, others are suggesting that some programmed links are sent to account holder mail and when user clicks on it, it exposes the account details to hacker(Personally I doubt this one).
It doesn't really matter how these hackers break into our accounts. What is important is that how we can stop or at least minimize such risks. We have come up with a simple checklist using which you can save your Google Adwords account from being hacked.
- Login to your Google Adwords accounts on a daily basis, if possible multiple times a day if you actively use your account. Check for any unsual activity in your account like new campaign which you didn't create, increased/decreased CPC of your own campaigns, wrong destination URLs etc.
- If you are not using your Google Adwords account at present then there are chances you'll not login to your account for many days. In such a case, you better cancel the account or inform Google Adwords support to keep an eye on any activity in your account and ask them for authorization for any new activity in your account.
- Follow some basic password security guidelines. Your password should not contain the user name; it should be minimum 8 characters and should be a combination of alphabets, numbers and at least one special character. It should not be very obvious, should not contain your name. Change the password on a regular basis.
- DO NOT access your Adwords account from public places like cyber cafe or through unsecured Wi-Fi. Always access your account from your home computer or office computer (if you use it dedicatedly)
You'll notice that all above things are quite basic but using these basic steps you can save your Google Adwords account from being hacked. In fact, above steps are not applicable to only your Google Adwords accounts but for your accounts/transactions where you deal with your credit cards, PayPal and bank accounts, like online shopping.
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