Spyware, viruses, & security forum: Poll: Has your e-mail account ever been hacked?

- First, my e-mail account doesn't have any contacts listed there; my contacts list is stored in my Thunderbird Portable client. And any sensitive information that I do store in the cloud is encrypted with Yadabyte Shhh!!!, using the longest password I have memorized.

- Second, my e-mail password comprises 15 characters, including: capitals, miniscules, numbers, and symbols.

- Third, my portable e-mail client is stored in a TrueCrypt virtual partition, protected with the longest password I have memorized.

- Fourth, I do not participate in chain letters, and advise loved ones to refrain as well.

- Fifth, I do not open spam messages (ambiguous messages are viewed in text-only format), and forward every spam message I receive to spam@uce.gov, webcomplaints@ora.fda.gov, and phishing-report@us-cert.gov.

- Sixth, I scan all attachments in messages from loved ones at VirusTotal or an alternative. Even though I don't expect any of my contacts to deliberately compromise my system, I do not place my safety in their hands (or anyone else's).

- Seventh, if I receive a spam message purporting to be from a loved one, I advise them to have their system(s) scanned for infections, and change their e-mail password to something that is difficult to guess. I then proceed to forward the spam message to spam@uce.gov, webcomplaints@ora.fda.gov, and phishing-report@us-cert.gov.

- Finally, I practice all of the techniques at Invincible Windows, in effort to prevent infection, and keylogging in case of infection despite my efforts. And for the last five years, neither has happened to my knowledge.

I suspect you're referring to POP3, but I use IMAP; I too have a choice of what I download. And even though Gmail is probably the most secure, free e-mail service available, you are still taking a leap of faith in the cloud. If your account gets hacked, as so many do, then everyone in your Web group is compromised. I too am "ultra cautious"; so much so that I refuse to hang the fate of my security (and that of anyone in my circle) on a single point of failure, especially one that is stored "out there" on the public Internet.

Frankly, if you store your contacts list in your Gmail account, then I would opine that the status quo of your success regarding e-mail security involves more luck than precaution on your part.

Here is a long list of reasons why chain letters are bad. Greeting cards are one thing but, still, there's nothing like a personal message (rather than canned) to show how much you love someone. I would hope that your friend cares more about you than about clicking the "forward" button, and enough to refrain from sharing your e-mail address (as well as her own) with spammers.

Luck my have something to do with it but I think mostly because I seldom "Social communicate". I have a Facebook account with privacy settings as tight as I can and still allow friends to see. And I am seldom on.

Yes, I have been hacked one time. I use a mail client to access my email via POP3. A friend gave me a heads-up when he received the first piece of spam from "me". I changed my password and that cured the problem.

They got me one time and though the name on the e-mail sounded familiar, I didn't have regular contact with this supposed person. So I opened the e-mil to see what it was they (he) wanted which opened the doorway to one of the nastiest viruses I've ever had. Within a very short time my p.c. became unusable and I couldn't even get a response from a re-boot. Total "green screen" even after leaving it shut down for a couple of days! I ended up having to pull the hard drive and getting it wiped clean. Very upsetting to me as all of my contacts, some in Europe & Australia and even some as close as Toronto were all lost with no way to recover them. I also had my record collection with thousands of entries I had been logging for years, lost to me. I wasn't too concerned at first because I had backed up my collection on disc but that soon turned to despair when I found I hadn't been backing my collection up often enough and my backup was out of date! I had no choice but to go through everything and check to be sure it had been re-entered. That was about 1 1/2 years ago and I'm still finding the occasional entry that wasn't fully restored. That file is now in a second p.c. that I use strictly for record keeping and does not have internet access. No internet - no bugs! I've also beefed up my security in this p.c. and have been successful at keeping unwanted visitors away! I changed e-mail providers, extended the length and difficulty of my password and have 2 anti-viruses installed. And nothing gets opened unless I've had regular contact with the sender!

My email was hacked. I did not realize it until I received an email at work from my son who let me know he had received spam from my email address. He quickly changed my password and then I set about changing passwords to every account that I have. No more problems, although everyone on my contact list also received this one spam.
Thank heaven for my computer savvy son!

Yes.

Just recently at RoadRunner.

We had our roadrunner e-mail taken over a few years ago, and the roadrunner people helped us find out what was going on (someone in a foreign country was using it) and they also helped us fix it. All has been fine since in our roadrunner, our mac mail, and with our g-mail accounts.
We never had a problem what-so-ever with our Mac computer even though we've accidentally opened some "bad" mail.
As far as spam, some seeps through, but we use recommended Mac Mail . . .Message, change to long headers in View, and forward it with all that sending info laid out to spam@uce.gov. If a Pay Pal or E-bay spam, we send it to the appropriate departments there.
I've tried the "Bounce" under Message, but that doesn't do much unfortunately. I've "bounced" Orchard Bank like 50 times, but they still send weekly!
All in all, if I got many unwanted messages (legit or bad) daily, like that one person mentioned, from creditors or anyone else, I'd change my e-mail address and get rid of the old one. I've got my address book saved on a thumb drive and could notify those I want to of the e-mail address change in a jiffy.
Other than that, be careful filling out forms on-line for anything . . . sweepstakes, contests, to join groups and clubs, whatever. Keep things private as you can on Facebook, MySpace, and the like.
Use a password on your WiFi and make sure people can't use it from the street or next door. Someone tried to pair with our device (computer) the other afternoon. Luckily I was sitting at the computer and immediately clicked "Deny".
And try not to use your real name all that much. I mean the very person who complained about the creditors sending dozens of e-mails a day signed with what looks like a real name!!! Find a "stage" name, as we call it here. Good luck.

I did try Outlook once, and a friend had Netscape Mail, but they seemed both to have security designed out of them, so I picked up on another friend's Eudora 3.0.6 Lite. This does not understand anything later than HTML 2.0, therefore no ActiveX, JavaScript, EcmaScript etc... It works on all Windows versions and can even support multiple users thru the command line on the Start icons, even on single-user systems! It is available from ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/eudora/eudoralight/windows/english/, and http://www.oldversion.com/download-Eudora-Light-3.0.6.html.

I needed a web-mail facility, and after some disappointments with good services that folded/were taken over, landed in Fastmail.fm. Very secure, very reliable, able to render and send in text-only, and very low-cost -- I get the free (ads on top bar) version 'cos I joined so long ago -- and it supports Very Strong passwords.

I use Email Remover to suss for spam, and IMapSize to quickly check my FastMail -- both of these can give you text-only previews.

Gordon.