Email Security Gone Haywire
Hackers are getting smarter by the day. Two of my three email accounts have been hacked on Saturday. Only a small number of people know my real email address.I have one gmail account exclusively for CS friends and I use another gmail account for my friends and family. Then, not to give my email address to all the sites I deal with, I use a yahoo account as a decoy. All the email arriving at yahoo is then redirected to my main gmail account (family and friends) which is downloaded by an email client (Thunderbird) every two hours, hoping to put a layer between my real account and the hackers. It did not work.
Both the yahoo and the gmail account were accessed by a device in Russia. Whoever did that was in possession of both passwords. How did they get hold of that? I have not directly accessed any of my email accounts for months so there cannot be a keylogger at work on my PC.
This is when I appreciate the use of an email client. At the best of times there is very little or nothing on the yahoo or gmail servers that a hacker can use. All my contacts and emails are managed by Thunderbird on my PC. The longest that a message can stay on the servers is two hours before it is downloaded and deleted from the servers. I can only hope that there was not anything on the servers at the time when they accessed my accounts.
Anyway, I changed my passwords and hope they don’t come back.
Comments (5)
They must have wasted an awful lot of time thinking I was spy or something. Foolish hackers.
Good morning cat by the way
Things like that worry me. Did it stop by itself?
Oh, by the way, Nessie arrived safely here in Cape Town. I could not talk to her for long. She was still very tired of the long swim. She'll be visiting her sister for a week.
I can assure you Nessie is a she. I should know. I was married to her sister for five years.
Bye for now!