What do you do if your email has been hijacked?

[Janiece Young]

My email has been hijacked.  How do I fix this?  I've changed my passwords on both of my emails.  Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Janiece

[Quyen]

Changing your password is the best way. Make sure you have some caps and numbers mixed up in there. Sometimes your e-mail doesn't really get "hijacked." Some companies have software that they run day and night to try to crack people's passwords and then send out a bunch of spam through your e-mail address.  Just happened to me recently where I was getting spam from myself. I changed my password, and it stopped.

[Janiece Young]

I changed my passwords.

I also just went to Kim Commando's Web site and downloaded a software that is supposed to clean out the malware and it's free.  It's doing a scan right now.

Of course whoever hijacked my email is sending out strange stuff.  It's making me look kinda strange but I guess people know me well enough to know that's not me.

What a mess.

Thanks, Quyen.

Janiece

[Quyen]

Janiece, at least you weren't trying to sell Cialis (among other penile [enlargement] products -- yes, plural) to yourself and all the people in your contacts. That's what the spammer bot did with my e-mail account. The first day I got spam from myself, I thought it was just some kind of fluke/glitch/mistake. I actually did not change my password until two or three days later, when I began to recognize the pattern, lol.

[Janiece Young]

Quyen,

Mine was to sell some questionable tee-shirts (LOL).  Of course it went out to some of the attorneys I work with.  Geez, I hope they know me well enough to get what was going on.  Like you, I didn't figure out what was going on until it had been happening for a couple days.

I changed my passwords.  

Also, I ran Malwarebytes which I got off of Kim Commando's site for free.  I saw a demo on Y-tube about it.  It is supposed to be the best.

So far so good today.

Janiece

[Marge Teilhaber (TILE hobber)]

Here's what I have in my passwords file.  Could be from Kim Komando or Richard Sherman:  (www.mrmodem.com).  Bottom line, we need a strong, crazy strong password.  That's all we can do.  It's happened to all of us.  

What I do is create a safe password that I can easily change to accommodate all-too-frequent requests to change it. I use a word and substitute special characters for letters, where permitted, along with a date. I would use, for example, Do!!arSign1900. The next time I'm asked to change my password, I'll use Do!!arSign1901, then Do!!arSign1902, etc. You can do it with anything, months of the year, cars, animals -- just about anything, such as APRIL!!2000, or 1952BU!CK, or K!TTY1935, etc.

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No one likes passwords which are cryptic and difficult to remember. However, the more cryptic the password, more difficult it is to crack. So what is the solution? We need passwords that are fairly easy to remember, but that cannot be easily guessed or cracked using automated programs.

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[Dean Morris]

Have a book, have a file, and record your user names and passwords.  With many accounts requiring user names and passwords, it's the sane thing to do.

[Kelli Combs (admin)]

I just got a weird email from my proofer this morning that she's in the Philippines and something happened and needs a bunch of money and she got all her money stolen.  The usual one.  My mom got a similar one too.  Pretty frustrating.

[Martha R]

Ha! I had that happen to me.  I was phished by a fake Yahoo email.   Sent emails to EVERYONE I ever sent an email to, not just my Contacts.   (we are talking attorneys!)  saying I need money.   then they changed my email address, so all responses are sent to the "fake" me.  Then they locked me out of my email.

So in essence I lost all my contacts and had to switch emails.    Bugger!

[Glen Warner]

Hi, Martha.

I use my Yahoo account mostly as a spam catcher.  I also use it for those Facebook notifications I can't turn off -- or at least, haven't quite gotten to as yet.

You would be better off with a Gmail account.  They're pretty good about keeping spam away from my Inbox thus far.

As for Yahoo, I think they're having some serious issues on the business side of things (the last CEO they hired lied on his resume!), and they have been making a few changes to try to compete with Facebook ... but it's probably too little, too late, so they may be going away in the not-too-distant.

Finally, I recently got an e-mail from some guy named Charles.  His e-mail address showed as charles (at) cheapandsleazy (dot) net.

I can have up to 500 e-mail addresses on Cheap and Sleazy, and thus far, I have only created three ... and none of them were for some guy named "Charles!"

That message got marked as junk as soon as I saw the From line.

[Mary Jo Cochran]

I change my password "frequently" - being decided by (1) a couple of months have gone by; (2) if I get a strange email: (3) too many people (roommate crap) have been in my house; (4) it feels like a good idea.  In general, every two months it's time.