Step on a hack, break your mother's back.

[captainsblog]

Okay, this is now TWO people since 6 this morning who've either emailed me themselves, or had their hacked account email me, making clear there had been an account compromise. These are smart, tech-savvy people. One of them's a minister, for crysake, proving that these schmucks have no schame.  And one was Yahoo, the other Gmail, proving that not even Sergey-Moose and Larry-Squirrel are safe from these vermin.

Much as I hate to say it, we're all probably too trusting when it comes to our online information. (Spare me the Weiner remarks- puhleeze:P)  It's probably a Best Practice to change all passwords at least monthly, especially on high-volume sites like cloud-based email accounts and social networks- and to change them to different things in all places.

::follows own advice::

----

Happy Tenth Anniversary to the Bush tax cuts.  To celebrate, I'm going to bake a cake, give 90 percent of it to the richest people I can find, and then break the knuckles of anyone else who tries to grab a piece of it.

Comments

[thediva-laments.livejournal.com]

There was an attempted hack on my hotmail account yesterday. Thankfully my password was strong enough to withstand it. I changed it anyway, to a stronger password, just to be safe.

[firynze.livejournal.com]

How could you tell there had been an attempt?

/is curious

[thediva-laments.livejournal.com]

Hotmail/MSN regularly log you out if you, as we do around here, have a hardened network and leave your computers logged in and just come and go from your machine. (I'm talking about my home network and server.) Yesterday I refreshed my inbox and it asked me to log in again and when I did, which isn't unusual, it did something unusual, it asked me to prove I was human with one of those Captcha tests.

I did that and then it took me to the regular login screen and advised me that too many login attempts had been made and that I had to input my email/password to get back into the system. That's what told me that someone, probably with an automated attack, had been trying to get into my account. As my hotmail account is *very* old and I have what one might consider a signature email address, someone feeding a list of words or conjunctions into a machine to check and see if the address exists without knowing it is very possible. Alternately, the guy that was stalking me a couple years back and who emailed me recently might have been trying, who knows?

[firynze.livejournal.com]

Ahhhhh, gotcha. It does the log in/log out with me, too, but I've never had it request a captcha. But yeah, okay, that totally reads "attempt to get into the account." I was wondering if there was some special back-door you could check to see if there were attempts!

[firynze.livejournal.com]

I need to go do a major password update. Sigh.

[canadiandiamond.livejournal.com]

Funny you should say that, as I've been meaning to overhaul all my passwords for awhile now but keep putting it off. Having my LOTRO account get hacked awhile back was no fun at all, and I shudder to think what'd happen if that had happened to one of my RL accounts, like my e-mail, bank, etc.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

Given what's going on with Sony and the Playstation hacks, I'd say that anything involving gamers should be especially locked down double tight right now. My daughter and her BF play PS3 games on our tv, and I've warned them about using any personal information there, especially stuff that might duplicate id or password information anywhere else.