Use One Gmail Account to Send Emails from Multiple IDs

In this post, I am going to show you how to use your Gmail account to send and receive emails from multiple addresses. Most of us own more than one email account say for example, one from Gmail, one from Yahoo and one from Hotmail. If you are tired of logging into multiple accounts to check your inbox or send emails, I have a solution here.

Gmail has an option to integrate multiple email accounts (email addresses) into a single Gmail account. Once you integrate multiple email addresses into your Gmail account, you can use the same account to send and receive emails for different email addresses you have. Let’s take a simple example.

Suppose you have three email addresses (email accounts):

1. john@gmail.com
2. john@yahoo.com
3. john@hotmail.com

You can integrate the emails john@yahoo.com and john@hotmail.com to john@gmail.com and operate all the three accounts from your single gmail account. Here is a step-by-step procedure to do this:

1. Login to your gmail account.
2. Click on Settings at the top right corner.
3. Under Settings, click on the  Accounts tab.
4. Now you’ll see the first option “Send mail as:“
5. Under this option, click on Add another email address you own.
6. Now a small new window will pop-up asking you to enter the details of your new email address.
7. Here you can enter any name and any email address. The email address need not belong to gmail only. You can enter your yahoo, hotmail or any other valid email address.
8. A Verification email will be sent to the address that you specify. Once you verify that you own the email address, it will be integrated to your Gmail account.

Now, when you compose a new email, you’ll see an option to select from multiple address to send the mail. Also you’ll receive the incoming mails for multiple addresses to a single mailbox. I hope this will benefit you.

Before you leave, I should also tell you one good advantage of this. According to Gmail privacy policy, they will not send the user’s IP address in the outgoing emails. That means, when you send an email from your Gmail account , the receiver will not be able to find out your IP address. But you do not have this advantage in Yahoo or other email providers.

Please share your opinions through comments.

 

What is Doxing and How it is Done?

Doxing

In the modern world, Internet has become a wonderful place to gain knowledge, exchange ideas, share information, make new friends and whatnot. Even though, you can do all of this by remaining anonymous behind your monitor, your real life identity and personal details can still be at the risk of falling into the hands of strangers. This is where the term “doxing” comes into play!

What is Doxing?

Doxing simply refers to the process of gathering or deducing other people’s information such as name, age, email, address, telephone number, photographs etc. using publicly available sources such as the Internet. In other words, doxing is the act of using the Internet to search for personal details about a person.

Doxing is done by initially taking a piece of information (such as “name” or “email address”) and keeping it as a base to find out other possible details about the person. The term “doxing” is derived from the word “document tracing” which means to retrieve documents about a particular person or company in order to learn more about them.

Doxing Techniques:

Today, Internet has grown to such a size that it contains almost any information that you’ve ever imagined! All you’ve to do is use the right techniques to search for what you want. Here is a list of doxing techniques that are most commonly used by Internet geeks and ethical hackers:

Using Google:

Google is undoubtedly a powerful tool that plays a key role in doxing. Since Google indexes almost anything on the Internet (sometimes even the private information), it is possible to dox for details such as email ID, address, phone numbers and photographs of a person or company. Once you obtain the search results for your query, carefully examine the description part which in most cases contain the piece of information that you are looking for.

Social Networking Websites:

As most Internet users are found to be active on social media, social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn provide a virtual goldmine of information necessary to perform doxing. As most users are unaware of online security issues, they have weak privacy settings on their profile. This makes it easy for the attackers to gain access to personal information such as photographs, real names, location, job, partner’s name etc.

Reverse Cell Phone LookUp:

A “Reverse Cell Phone Lookup” is simply a process of finding someone’s personal details such as name, age, address and related information by using their cell phone number and vice versa. There are many online services out there such as cell phone registry that provide access to the personal details about a given person based on his/her phone, name and email ID.

Whois Searches:

If a person or company has a website (or domain name) associated with them, you can easily perform a “whois search” for their website to obtain personal details such as full name, address, email and phone number. Just visit whois.domaintools.com and enter the domain name for which you want to perform a whois search. It will show up all the details associated with the domain name.

Why Would Anyone Want to Perform Doxing?

Most people perform doxing out of general curiosity about a person or company. However, there are some wicked minds out there who do this for the purpose of blackmailing or taking revenge by exposing the information that they have gathered about the person.

What are the Consequences of Doxing?

It can be slightly irritating and embarrassing when private data fall in the hands of people who are not intended to have access to such information. However, things can go even worse if the doxed information such as a person’s social activities, medical history, sexual preference and other vital bits of information is made public. This can have a serious threat to health, livelihood or relationship of the victim.

Steps to Protect Yourself from Doxing:

The following are some of the most commonly targeted pieces of information that can be easily obtained through doxing:

• Full name
• Age, gender and date of birth
• Location and place of birth
• Email addresses and username
• Phone number
• Social networking profiles, websites and blogs

So, it is always a good practice to keep the above bits of information hidden. Even though it is not possible to do this in all cases, you can still take care to protect as much information as you can from going public. You can consider the following additional tips for further protection:

1. Do not upload personal photographs on web albums such as “Picasa”. Even if you do, make sure that your album is hidden from public and search engines.
2. If you do not intend to show up your profile on search engines, it is a wise choice to make all the Internet profiles private.
3. Maximize the privacy settings of your social network profiles. Make sure that your individual albums and photographs have their privacy settings configured.
4. Do not use the same email address for all you accounts. Instead, create separate email IDs for individual activities such as gaming, forum participation, banking accounts etc.

Is Doxing a Crime?

Doxing is definitely not a crime when used within the ethical standards and no harm is being caused to anyone. However, if doxing is done to cause intentional damage such as harassment, blackmailing or taking revenge it might well be considered an offence.

 

Customize Google to Improve Search Results

Google is undisputedly the best search engine out there on the Internet, however there are a few ways by which you can customize Google and make it even better.

I have got 3 best free Firefox extensions using which you can customize Google by adding extra useful information to your search results and remove unwanted information like ads, spam and click tracking so as to improve the overall searching experience. The following are the 3 best extensions for Firefox using which you can improve the search results.

1. OptimizeGoogle:

Using OptimizeGoogle, you can get rid of text ads from Google search results, add links from about 10 other search engines, add position counter, product results and more. You can even filter your search results to see dead websites (using WayBack Machine) and remove click tracking so that you can search anonymously. Here is a list of some of the other useful features of this plugin:

1. Use Google suggest (get word suggestion while typing)
2. Add more security by using https wherever necessary
3. Filter spammy websites from search results page
4. Option to remove SideWiki
5. Add links to bookmark your favorite result
6. Add links to other news and product search sites

To install the plugin, just visit the OptimizeGoogle page from your Firefox browser and click on the Download button. Once installed, you can enable or disable the customization options from the Tools -> OptimizeGoogle Options.

After you customize Google to improve the search results, how about adding a feature that provides a way to preview the website in the search results itself? Here is a miracle Firefox extension to this job for us.

2.  SearchPreview:

SearchPreview (formerly GooglePreview) will insert thumbnail view of the web page into the Google search results page itself so that you can take the guess work out of clicking a link. Just install the plugin, reload Firefox and you will have the SearchPreview at work. You can install this plugin from the following link:

SearchPreview Download

OptimizeGoogle and SearchPreview have made our search results smarter and faster. Now how about safer? Well you have another Firefox plugin to make your search results safer as well. Here we go.

3. McAfee SiteAdvisor:

This is a free browser plugin that gives safety advice about websites on the search results page before you actually click on the links. After you install the SiteAdvisor plugin, you will see a small rating icon next to each search result, which will alert you about suspicious/risky websites and help you find safer alternatives. These ratings are derived based on various tests conducted by McAfee.

Based on the quality of links, SiteAdvisor may display Green, Yellow, Red or Grey icon next to the search results. Green means that the link is completely safe, Yellow means that there is a minor risk, Red means a major risk and Grey means that the site is not yet rated. These results will guide you to Web safety.

SiteAdvisor works on both Internet Explorer and Firefox which you can download from the following link:

Download McAfee SiteAdvisor

Here is a snapshot of all the 3 plugins at work:

 

Hide Data in Image, Audio and Video Files: Steganography

Ever wondered to know how to hide secret data in image, audio and video files? Well, in this post I will take you through a concept called steganography using which, it is possible to hide your secret information in image files, songs or any other file of your choice. At the end of this post, you can also download free stegnographic tools and start hiding your data.

 

Hide Data in Image

What is Steganography?

Steganography is a means of obscuring data where secret messages are hidden inside computer files such as images, sound files, videos and even executable files so that, no one except the sender and the receiver will suspect the existence of stealth information in it. Steganography may also involve the usage of cryptography where the message is first

encrypted before it is concealed in another file. Generally, the messages appear to be something else such as an image, sound or video so that the transfer of secret data remains unsuspected.

The main advantage of steganography over other methods such as cryptography is that, it will not arose suspicion even if the files fall in the hands of a third party. Unlike cryptographic messages, stegnographic messages will no way attract the attention of a third party by themselves. Thus stegnanography has an upper hand over cryptography as it involves both encryption and obscurity.

What are the Applications of Steganography?

Steganography is mainly used to obscure confidential information/data during storage or transmission. For example, one can hide a secret message in an audio file and send this to another party via email instead of sending the message in the textual format. The receiver on the other end will decrypt the hidden message using the private decryption key. In a worst case scenario, even if a third party does manage to gain access to the email, all he can find is the audio file and not the hidden data inside it. Other usage of steganography include digital watermarking of images for reasons such as copyright protection.

Even though steganography has many useful applications, some may use this technique for illegitimate purposes such as hiding a pornographic content in other large files. Rumors about terrorists using steganography for hiding and communicating their secret information and instructions are also reported. An article claiming that, al-Queda had used steganography to encode messages in images and transported them via e-mails, was reported by New York Times, in October 2001.

How do Steganography Tools Work?

Stegnography tools implement intelligent algorithms to carefully embed the encrypted text messages or data inside other larger files such as an image, audio, video or an executable file. Some tools will embed the encrypted data at the end of another file so that there will be enough room for storing larger data.

There are many steganography tools available online but only a few are able to work flawlessly. I did not find any tool that worked perfectly on both small and large data. However, I have  managed to develop my own tool that can work perfectly on all types of files and all size of data. The tool is called “Stego Magic“. You can download it from the following link.

Download StegoMagic.zip

The zip file contains two versions of Stego Magic: One for encrypting the text messages and the other for encrypting binary files. StegoMagic_TXT can be used to hide text messages in other files such as an image or a sound file. StegoMagic_BIN can be used to hide one binary file in another such as an executable file inside an image or an image inside a video file.

With Stego Magic, there is no limitation on the size and type of the file that you are intending to hide. For example, you can hide a video of size 1 GB in an image of size 1 MB or hide an executable file inside a WORD document. The tool is pretty straightforward to use and requires no special understanding of the concept.

At the end of the encryption process, a secret decryption key will be generated and the same is required during the decryption process.

How to Use Stego Magic?

Suppose you want to hide a text message inside a JPG file:

1. Place the JPG and the text file (.txt) in the same folder as that of StegoMagic_TXT.exe
2. Run StegoMagic_TXT.exe and follow the screen instructions to embed the text message inside the JPG image.

Please note that if you’re using Windows 7/Vista, right-click the file and select “Run as Administrator”. Otherwise the tool may fail to work properly.

1. Note down the secret decryption key.

Now you can send this image to your friend via email. To decrypt the hidden message, your friend should load this JPG file onto the Stego Magic tool and use the secret decryption key.

I hope you’ve now understood what is steganography and how to use it to hide your secret data. For queries and feedback, please pass your comments.