To add to this excellent advice, be very, very careful when using a smartphone to access your e-mail!
I was in Paris in February on business, and took some time for tourism. I was standing outside the Louvre after visiting the museum, and decided to try to access my gmail account on my smartphone. It asked me to log in again "to improve the services that Google can offer." I thought about that for a minute, but mentally shrugged my shoulders and gave it my password. It didn't take me to my e-mail, but to a "cannot display page" message. A week later, I logged into my gmail account on a computer, to find that someone had just accessed my account from Thailand and send spam to everyone in my contacts list (literally, 15 minutes earlier). Since my password had never been hacked before, I am blaming the Louvre incident for the problem -- someone was sitting there in the area, redirecting websurfers and harvesting their passwords. Adding to the problem: what account do you use as your password recovery account? Nearly all of the sites where I have a password send password confirmations to my gmail address -- all a hacker has to do is search for "password" and harvest what they find. Consider using a different account than that which you use while traveling, so your other passwords aren't endangered. Moral of the story: be very, very careful with your passwords, your smartphones, and everything else. If something doesn't look right, it probably isn't. Best regards Elizabeth, now sadder and wiser On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 1:44 PM, Avital <spind...@gmail.com> wrote: > Please ignore the emails from Andrea's account. I've seen the "help, > I'm in trouble, I need money wired to this address" fraud a lot > lately. It means that someone has hacked her account and is using it. > > In the meantime, please try to choose strong passwords for your email > accounts (more than 8 letters, including both upper/lower case > letters, numbers, characters like @ $ % &, etc) and DO NOT USE THE > SAME PASSWORD for all your accounts! If you use the same password and > one of your accounts is compromised, the hacker is going to try > Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Paypal, Yahoo, Amazon, and everything else > that he or she can think of! > > One recommendation that I heard is to have a strong "base" password, > like eR%*foA77Qt and add the first 2 consonants and the first 2 vowels > of each account. For example, if you had "eR%*foA77Qt" as your base > password, your Gmail account password might be eR%*foA77Qtgmai. > Facebook would be eR%*foA77Qtfcae. It's not foolproof but it makes it > a little harder for someone to guess the pattern. > > Alternatively, if you tend to use only one computer or carry around a > mini USB drive (thumb drive, disk on key, flash drive), you can > download free password protection programs (like AnyPassword) and > store your passwords there. > > Last, if you're on vacation, be very, very careful if you're using a > public computer in an Internet cafe. A lot of public computers are > infected with programs that track your keystrokes. If you must log on > to your mail account on an unsecured computer, at least change your > password immediately. There are programs you can download that let you > "type" your password by clicking a keyboard on the screen. This makes > it much harder for a program to catch your keystrokes. (But it doesn't > help if they've set up cameras to watch the keyboard while you > type....) > > Avital > Arachne moderator > > -- > > Blog: http://apinnick.wordpress.com > Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spindexr > > - > To unsubscribe send email to majord...@arachne.com containing the line: > unsubscribe lace y...@address.here. For help, write to > arachne.modera...@gmail.com. Photo site: > http://community.webshots.com/user/arachne2003 > - To unsubscribe send email to majord...@arachne.com containing the line: unsubscribe lace y...@address.here. For help, write to arachne.modera...@gmail.com. Photo site: http://community.webshots.com/user/arachne2003
