On Being Hacked.

[danieldwilliam]

About a week or so ago my hotmail account was hacked and the usual torrent of spam flowed out into the world.

Since then my hotmail account has not worked properly on my iPhone. I’ve also been locked out of my hotmail account and had to recover it. This happened about a week after the initial hacking incident. Not before it, not during it, not immediately after it but a week later, after I’d changed my password a couple of times and started sending apologies.

So hackers have wandered into my account without Bill Gates stopping them and then he’s made my life even harder by using this event to block my account.

I think he may have lost my business.

I might shift my personal email to google - unless there are any other suggestions.

One think I have become curious about is how the hackers got into my account.  Do they just try every possible combination of account name and password or do they circumnavigate the whole security apparatus through the magic of clever?

Comments

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

I've been on Gmail for about ten years, I think. It works for me - although every six months or so they update it, and I whine and bitch for a couple of weeks until I realise it actually works better now.

Most hacker attacks are brute force jobs - they just run the numbers until they get a hit.

There's an XKCD cartoon somewhere about how we've been trained to choose passwords which are very hard for humans to remember, and very easy for computers to guess.

(It's this one: http://xkcd.com/936/ and it's the first google hit for XKCD)

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I've got a gmail account for my nom de guerre and I quite like it.

I've seen the cartoon and as a result started changing the way I create passwords.

Gmail

[pentopman.livejournal.com]

Generally, hackers will get your password through other means, such as through malware installed on your machine, or through fooling you into entering the password into an incorrect site. Trying every password is too easy to spot and stop.... unless you have a stupidly short password

Gmail offers 2 factor authentication, which is a reason to switch in itself in my book. If you have a smart phone like an iphone, android or blackberry, you can (and should) turn it on. Better security than my bank offers me, and I don't pay them a penny.

Here are more links and more wordage on this than you probably ever wanted:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/04/your-gmail-hacking-finale-official-advice-from-google/237734/
http://icrontic.com/article/how-to-enable-two-factor-authentication-on-your-google-account
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/advanced-sign-in-security-for-your.html

Re: Gmail

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

I think gmail is winning.

antivirus software

[kujisaa.livejournal.com]

You can try a antivirus software to help you protect your pc from virus, download this free antivirus software: http://www.anvisoft.com