Email hacked?

You have people receiving odd emails from you and assume you’ve been hacked. What has happened?

Computer Hacked?

This is unlikely and one of the situations below is more likely. If you have other symptoms or are worried then I am happy to check your system, please get in touch.

Phished or email hacked?

Email hacking is not as easy as one might think, more likely you’ve been ‘phished’ – tricked into logging in to a fake site and your details have been compromised. Change your password and all should be well.

Spoofed?

Depending on your email setup, it may not be difficult for a spammer to send out email as if it is from you. This usually happens when a group email including yours has fallen into the wrong hands – and this may be nothing to do with you directly at all.

This can be hard to tell from Phished per above. Change your password anyway.

,,,and finally

Best practice is to use different passwords for different sites – at the very least have a unique one for your email.

If somebody has acquired your email address and password then they may try to log into other sites of which you have membership.

So, if you use other websites with the same email address and password as your email one then log in soonest and change the passwords on those sites.

Facebook message from a friend…

There have been a spate of these recently. A message from a Friend (and it is the actual account, not a clone) asks you to look at video (for example).

I got this twice from Friends. I experimentally followed the link with a fake account which I keep around for these situations. It craftily asks you to log into Facebook in order to see the video or whatever. Your email and password are then captured! This lets the scammer masquerade as you and get up to no good.

The Friends who apparently sent me the message had been caught by the same trick so it’s a chain reaction.

Implications go further. If you use the same password everywhere then they can get access to your email and more and get up to even more mischief.