The hacker saga continues…

Google returned my account to me Tuesday afternoon. A lot of the email messages were missing. If I missed an email from you, please resend it.

My drafts were gone. I used these to hold some forms that I send often. Fortunately, I had some copies in my sent mail.

I did lose links to my blog posts and to posts of others that I was saving. In the future I will email them to another of my accounts.

Strangely enough, I wasn’t receiving any new emails. This is very unusual, since I’m on everyone’s mailing list and receive hundreds of messages per day. This may be a good thing, since I had so many messages in my inbox and in “all mail”, that it would be hard for anyone to find anything useful for other evil activities.

After checking in my settings, I found that everything was being directed into the trash. I looked through the filters and found that my mail was being forwarded to another account. Of course, that would be where all password reset notices would be sent.

The account was almost like mine, except it used ymail instead of gmail. You would need to pay close attention to see the difference if you received an email from that account.

I think what led to this is the number of membership sites that have sprung up. (Yes, I’m developing some myself.) Most of these (the good ones) are using WordPress. Yes, just like this blog.

These member sites send an email to the new users with the username and password. If you use the same password on these accounts as you do on your “important” accounts, they can be intercepted or hacked from the servers.

If you use the same password, it only takes one security breach to compromise all your accounts, even if you have a “secure” password.

So, here are a few more lessons learned…

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I’ve spent the last day and a half contacting vendors, changing passwords, and assuring friends that I was not mugged in London.

Please, if you received a message from me, DO NOT send money.  Apparently this is a common scam (the emergency scam). Western Union has some information about these scams on their website.

If you did send money for this or another scam using Western Union, report the fraud on their website.

Since I used my email account to store my information, other accounts have been hacked as well.

The scammer even hacked into my online backup and tried to backup one of his own computers. This gave him access to other files on my computer.

As the world shrinks and it becomes easier to contact people across the globe (I had a phone call from Kevin Riley in Japan warning me that I’d  been hacked), these 6 cheap propecia incidents are becoming more common.

If you receive a message that this, contact the friend who sent the message, if you can. Cell phones make this easier world-wide.

If you can’t reach the friend, contact a mutual friend Buy Levitra Professional to see what they know.

Gtalk was hot with messages from my friends to each other asking what everyone knew about the situation.

My phone was busy with calls from people telling me about the scam and with me calling vendors to report the problem. So a lot of folks heard a busy signal.

I really appreciate everyone’s concern. I really found out how many friends I have in a difficult time.

The problem resulted from me not following the procedures that I teach.

To avoid having this happen to you…

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Noted copywriter John Carlton said, “Nothing happens in business until the writing is done.” That is very true, especially when your business is writing.

If writing is your business, you will have no business if you don’t do the writing. Networking and promotion is futile without writing to promote.

However, you can’t spend all of your time writing unless you have a staff to do the promotion and business activities for you. Most of us don’t have that luxury.

Even if your writing business hasn’t yet started to pay off, you must realize that it is indeed a business. You are the owner of your own small business.

No one (especially the IRS) will take your writing business seriously until you do.

So, how do you treat your writing as a business

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