Security wake up call

I don’t think that I’ve had this much adrenalin pumping through my system on a Saturday morning in quite a while. My girlfriend signed into her email (as she does most mornings), to discover an email from eBay Live Support asking for a code. She called me over and a few seconds later the email vanished. What happened after that point is a blur of password resets, both her and the would be hacker trying to gain control of the hotmail and through it the eBay account. There were paranoid moments when passwords wouldn’t work, but in the end she’s still in control of the accounts. Just about every account she owns has now had the password and details changed to help protect it.

It’s intrusive though. How exactly did the attacker break into the account? Not phishing, Cherie is well aware of those type of malicious emails. Guessing the security questions? Maybe.

That raises other concerns though, email addresses become repositories of knowledge for our online lives. Just about every account you sign up for online has to have an email account linked to it, that means many details about your online life are there in fragments. We’ll never know exactly what the hacker had access to (albeit briefly).

I’m personally going to be reviewing all my accounts to make sure that they’re secure, and I’d advise you to do the same.