While there are people who will break into other’s websites, bank accounts and email accounts for fun, there is usually a financial motive behind the behavior. Listed below are a few of these.
This is linked to getting your social security number. If someone can get enough accurate information about you. With for example, your birth date, your full name, your address, your social security number (in the USA) etc., the hacker can build a profile and use it to trick financial institutions to change your address and lend them loans or gain access to services they wouldn’t normally have access to, such as health insurance and loans.
Using your Gmail account, they could access other accounts where they could possibly get hold of these numbers. This could be a shopping site, which doesn’t store your card details as securely as they should.
In the US, hackers may try to get hold of your social security number. This would give them access to loans etc. In other countries, a social security number is not used as the gold standard for identification as it is in the USA so this may not be applicable to readers outside of the States.
Email addresses are big business. There are databases being sold illegally on the internet for spammers, scammers and hackers. Your friends’ details are valuable.
This is a popular scam. A fraudster will log into an account and send an email to a friend. They say you are abroad and that you have been stranded/mugged or lost all your money. They will then ask your friend to send you money through a money transfer service or direct to their bank. They will then delete the email to your friend so that you can’t warn you friend in time.
Your friend at this point is worried about you and sends money without checking that you are actually on vacation. Depending on your friends’ generosity, this could be quite lucrative.
If you have a Google Voice account, hackers could use this service for long distance phone calls or even for more scams.
It may sound far-fetched but a competitive company could hire a nefarious hacker to peruse your documents to steal your ideas, business processes or contacts. By protecting your accounts, you can help to keep this information to yourself.