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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…
