Help! My Email Has Been Hacked!

This week I spoke with two more sales associates that had fallen prey to an increasingly more common attack, the Email Account Hack.

In both cases the email provider was Yahoo and both sales associates lost all of their emails and all of their contacts. They both also had numerous emails sent out from their accounts to all of their contacts stating that they were stuck in Madrid and needed money. In some cases even all of the email addresses that are present on any message in any of your email folders are also used.

After speaking with both of these agents and hearing the desperation in their voices, I felt compelled to create this post. No offense to either of the victims, they didn’t really do anything to make this occur and they are no different than the thousands of people that this happens to each and every day.

There are however a few “best practices” items that I think are important enough for me to address here.

1. Make sure that all of your computers have updated antivirus and malware protection and that it’s regularly updated. Don’t download suspicious files / games / free offers from the internet or social networking sites.

2. We all should be backing up our emails and our contact lists.

3. One of the agents used a company email alias which allowed them to switch to a new email account and switch the alias to the new account. This saved the agent from having to contact everyone they know to notify them that they have a new email address.

4. Most of the cases that I’ve seen involved a free email account or service that was pretty much useless when it came to offering any assistance to the victim. That is if you can even find a way to contact the right people at any of these companies.

5. Use an effective password that contains numerous characters including a mix of upper and lower case letters, numbers and punctuation.

I’ve included two links below containing additional information on the subject for those that are interested.

What do I do when my email has been hacked and spam is sent to my contacts?

Was my email hacked?