The Email Issue

Chances are, if your reading this you've heard about my email issue. Someone hijacked my hotmail account that I have had for over 12 years now and started sending out emails stating that I am in London and that I have been mugged and need $2500 sent to London.

Well its not true, I am in Moscow and safe and sound. However I am still fighting to get my original hotmail account closed and wanted to pass on some lessons learned for those of you out there who use free email accounts from places like hotmail, gmail, yahoo, live.com, etc.

1. If an email account is free, that means without anyone telling you, YOU HAVE NO SUPPORT OR HELP, at all, case closed.

2. Always do the following at least once a week. Empty your deleted items. ALWAYS delete everything out of sent items and then Empty your deleted items.

3. Never send personal information via a free account. The first thing someone does when they take your account over is go through your deleted and send items to try and find personal items by which they can get into your online identity.

4. All of these free accounts have a couple of ways to recover your account if it gets hacked, all of which, the hackers know and that will be the first thing that they will fix so that you can't get it back.

5. Finally, sit down and think of every site you ever signed up for using your free email account. Now, think about the times you have forgotten the password and went to the link on that site and clicked on "Forgot your password?" You get an email that gives you a link that allows you to reset your password. You click on it and almost instantly, you have access to your account again. Now, a hacker that takes over your email account will be able to do the same thing...think about that.

6. Finally, NEVER use the same password over and over and over again (You know who you are). Once a hacker guess your password, he/she will go through your email to the sites you visit regularly, and try that password first.

7. All passwords should be a minumum of 12 to 14 characters long with symbols (i.e. !@#$) and combinations of letters (Upper and lowercase) and numbers.

8. Never access your free email accounts on public accesss computers or computers you don't trust 100%. Most people and most public access computers remember usernames and passwords by default.

Later,
Wes