If an attacker compromises an online account what damage can they do and does the user wrest back control?

A new Google analysis of manual (as opposed to automated) account takeovers on its own services between 2011 and 2014 suggests that getting a hijacked account back is often a painful process that happens only after considerable damage has been done.

Manual attacks get to work on a compromised Gmail victims account very rapidly, within 30 minutes in many cases, while trawling through the victim’s email history for banking details and other valuable data usually took no longer than between minutes.

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