Hacked!

I’ve been using the internet since Prodigy was around.  Yes, that makes me a nerd.  Yes, that shows my age a bit.  However, not once in the entirety of my internet history have I ever been hacked.  This morning, that changed.

Walking out of the restroom at work, I receive a call from a friend.  I don’t take calls at work on my personal phone so I let it go to voicemail and figured I’d respond at lunch.  I then receive a text message.  Your gmail has been hacked.   What?  Clearly this cannot be correct.  I rush back into the office and sit down at my conglomeration of LCD monitors (I swear if it ever turns up that LCD puts off some sort of radiation that causes cancer, I’m so done for).

I immediately switch to my open mail account and change my password.  I then go to the Sent Mail folder to survey how much damage has actually been done.  Only one email message.  Phew.  Wait, there is no one in the To field.  Oh crap.  That’s my entire address book in the BCC field.  Lovely.

I then receive an onslaught of text messages from concerned friends making me aware that my account has been hacked.  This seems only fair.  I spammed them, they spam me.  Really though, I do appreciate the concern guys.

So, as Q so eloquently pointed out, your account only gets hacked for one of two reasons.  Either you have a crappy password or you entered your information into a website that you probably shouldn’t have been at anyway.  My password is like Fort Knox strong so take a guess at what had to have happened.

I pride myself on being pretty good at catching phishing attempts and not putting my real information into any site that may lead to this sort of event occurring however I apparently slipped up.  I have made fun of people forever for getting hacked.  I’d say things like, “If you are just smart about what you do on the internet, you’ll never get hacked.”  My apologies to those people and to my friends who received a bunch of broken english advertising some crappy website today.

Such a lovely way to start a Wednesday morning.

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