Hacked Email Address

Kind of obvious. For this password change, you don’t need a super good password. Just something that someone who has been reading all your email for a few weeks in not going to guess real quick. Just a quick easy password. Make sure you will remember it for then next few minutes too. It won’t do us much good to be locked out of our own email. This password change is just to lock the hacker out while we close some of the other holes.

Gmail Email Forwarding

With a forwarding address, any email coming in to your email is copied and automatically sent to another email address. There is no notification like a normal sent email. Hotmail and Gmail allow free email forwarding. Forwarding addresses are part of Yahoo’s premium email so if you don’t use the premium service (pay for it) it’s unlikely that there will be one. Check anyways. If there is a forwarding address (and it is not one of your email addresses that is secure) make sure you delete it and change the password again.

These are those questions like “What is your mother’s maiden name?” or “What city were you born in?” You need to change the questions and give a nonsense answer to them. A hacker could easily have check or changed them to make regaining access to your account easy. The answer should not able a realistic answer for the question. Write down your answers as they won’t be easy to remember when you have answered several with wrong answers. You don’t want someone who has had access to your email to be able to guess the answers. They already may know a lot about you.

Check the backup address

Very likely, you needed to have an email address to create this one. Maybe you still use it and maybe you don’t but it is probably still there. It may be the way they got the password this time. Make sure that the backup email is still secure and controlled by you. It would be easy for a hacker to substitute an email he controls in place of yours so he could request a new password sent to it.

Your password should be at least 12 characters, use upper and lower case, numbers, and punctuation or other none standard character. Write it down if you need to but keep it in a safe place. A good idea for a password is to take the first letter of each word in a few sentences from your favorite book. Keep or add some capital letters, punctuation and the page number and you have a strong password that should be very difficult to crack and still be easy to remember. Whatever you do, make sure it is strong (in away, you are securing your bank account).

Now your email account is secure!

Avoid logging into your account on public computers or on unsecured wi-fi networks. Try to always use the https address ( https://mail.google.com instead of http://mail.google.com ). Never use your email password on other accounts.

You need to go through this with any account that you used your email address to create. Remember the hacker could have gotten those password using your email address.

Maybe you were tricked into using your password on a phishing site (a site meant to look like another site to steal your log in credentials. Maybe it was sniffed at an unsecured wi-fi network.

The other possibility is malware on your computer. Email as well as other account passwords and information are one of the prime targets of malware. My suggestion is to use a malware removal too like Malwarebytes Antimalware or SuperAntiSpyware (aff). Both are excellent tools and have free versions. If I am certain a computer is infected, I will usually use both to check and clean it off (as well as a few other tricks I’ve picked up). These two programs do an excellent job at getting malware that has slipped by your normal anti-virus and disabled it. Follow it up by reinstalling your anti-virus software and running a full scan.

Sory that this happened to you.