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General discussion (archive)Gmail Account - hacked?(28 posts)solved(28 posts)solved
(28 posts)solved
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Posted January 16, 2011
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Tarm: This happened to me not long ago. Figured it was a brute force dictionary attack
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Aliasalpha: Nothing protects against that, my credit card was compromised by one of those a few weeks back. Shitty luck but it was caught immediately (idiots tried to use netflix on an australian card) so it was cool
I've been lucky so far but luck don't last forever.
Posted January 16, 2011
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Runehamster: I have a very strange problem. I logged into my private email account - not the one I use to sign up for things - and I received a notification that my email may have been hacked, because it was accessed by a server in China via a "POP3"...thing. I don't know what that is. I changed my password, but now I'm worried. The only thing I've done recently with that email address that I don't normally do is put it in as my contact info on a purchase from Asus computers. How could this have happened? I scan regularly for Malware and don't go to any 'iffy' sites.

Should I be worried? Have I not been careful enough? This isn't even the email I sign up for random internet stuff, I can't believe it was around. I do use it for Twitter and Facebook.

Should I warn family members? What if people try to use my email to sign up for things?
Sounds like the same thing my friend was hit with late last year, also a Chinese IP. His blog posts may interest you:
http://dunjen.wordpress.com/2010/11/23/gmail-hacked/
http://dunjen.wordpress.com/2010/11/26/gmail-hacked-reclaim-your-account/
Posted January 16, 2011
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Runehamster: I have a very strange problem. I logged into my private email account - not the one I use to sign up for things - and I received a notification that my email may have been hacked, because it was accessed by a server in China via a "POP3"...thing. I don't know what that is. I changed my password, but now I'm worried. The only thing I've done recently with that email address that I don't normally do is put it in as my contact info on a purchase from Asus computers. How could this have happened? I scan regularly for Malware and don't go to any 'iffy' sites.

Should I be worried? Have I not been careful enough? This isn't even the email I sign up for random internet stuff, I can't believe it was around. I do use it for Twitter and Facebook.

Should I warn family members? What if people try to use my email to sign up for things?
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Auguste: Sounds like the same thing my friend was hit with late last year, also a Chinese IP. His blog posts may interest you:
http://dunjen.wordpress.com/2010/11/23/gmail-hacked/
http://dunjen.wordpress.com/2010/11/26/gmail-hacked-reclaim-your-account/
Very useful!

I did the checklist to make sure nothing was wrong and luckily it doesn't seem that they did something nasty when they hacked my account.
Posted January 16, 2011
This page randomly generates long, random and complex passwords. It's set up to be secure and will not cache. I used it only yesterday to generate the preshared key for my wifi, and later mixed a couple chunks together to create a new steam password.
Post edited January 16, 2011 by Drat
Posted January 16, 2011
Whee! Thanks so much, everyone, I finally feel safe again. That was so odd...I felt distinctly violated. And the Chinese IP had set it up so their POP3 server could pull all my emails, so I warned everyone I know that my email might have been compromised and deactivated POP3 access.
Posted January 16, 2011
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Aliasalpha: Best option I came across is getting my favourite game off the shelf (OFP in my case) and using part of the CD key as a password, good length, met complexity requirements and the like
The bar code is also good for that. I've done that before.
Posted January 16, 2011
My dad got this a while ago. I looked in his "sent mail" and there were about a dozen mails, each with a randomly-generated paragraph and a link to a url-shortener.
Posted January 16, 2011
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Runehamster: Whee! Thanks so much, everyone, I finally feel safe again. That was so odd...I felt distinctly violated. And the Chinese IP had set it up so their POP3 server could pull all my emails, so I warned everyone I know that my email might have been compromised and deactivated POP3 access.
POP3 and IMAP are protocols used for fetching and sending email from your desktop computer. They basically tell your computer where to go (Gmail in this case). They're both pretty safe to use as they both will require your current password to work, but if you aren't actively using either, it's best to leave them off.

Changing your password and getting rid of any email forwarding rules that may have been set up are the first steps, like my friend mentioned in his blog.
Posted January 16, 2011
Thank you, Auguste! I actually did pretty much go through that checklist :D
Posted January 16, 2011
By the way, it's a good idea to use Mailwasher to "receive" your emails first. Doing so will reduce the danger of being infected with whatever strange script that comes attached with them, or at least that's what Mailwasher users claim. I like it a lot, as it complements Thunderbird quite nicely too.
Posted January 16, 2011
By the way Runehamster, I don't think my friend specifically said, but I strongly recommend you also change all passwords for all websites you signed up for with that email account. As you know, you usually get your password emailed to you by the websites you sign up for, and since POP has been enabled, the hackers very likely have a copy of every password that's ever been emailed to you.

Also, if you use any of those same passwords on other websites, even if you didn't sign up for them with that account, you should change them too. It's common for people to use the same passwords for everything, so it would be easy to use the same passwords on other websites too.
Posted January 16, 2011
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Auguste: By the way Runehamster, I don't think my friend specifically said, but I strongly recommend you also change all passwords for all websites you signed up for with that email account. As you know, you usually get your password emailed to you by the websites you sign up for, and since POP has been enabled, the hackers very likely have a copy of every password that's ever been emailed to you.

Also, if you use any of those same passwords on other websites, even if you didn't sign up for them with that account, you should change them too. It's common for people to use the same passwords for everything, so it would be easy to use the same passwords on other websites too.
I've actually been going through and doing this, I usually come up with this stuff out of sheer paranoia myself. Thank you very much for the tip, though, you're right - that could be really bad. For instance, I had used the same password for my bank o.O
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General discussion (archive)Gmail Account - hacked?(28 posts)solved(28 posts)solved
(28 posts)solved