Friday, November 11, 2011

Cats And Hackers

So, momma cat has successfully been spayed! She's also been vaccinated, de-wormed, and tested for feline leukemia (negative), since I know for sure I'm never, ever going to manage to catch her again, and I wanted to do as much as I could for her while we had her. I released her back into the wild this morning, where she consumed the food and water I left out for her like a very hungry and thirsty kitty indeed, then took off for parts unknown. Hopefully somewhere warm; it's a bit chilly out there this morning. I wish her well. And, no more kittens! Yay!

In less awesome news, my gmail account was hacked last night, apparently by someone in Russia. It looks like they only had access for a few minutes, and managed to send out all of six spams before gmail noticed and locked the account down for suspicious activity. Thank you, gmail! After careful inspection, they don't seem to have changed any of my settings or done anything else nasty to the account, so it could have been a hell of a lot worse. Of course, this has now made me paranoid in ways that the mandatory computer security briefing they made me attend at work this week never managed. So I've now turned on gmail's two-step verification process, where you have to get a verification code sent to your phone (or employ one of a couple of other backup methods) to get into your account when logging in from a new computer. Or even an old one, every 30 days. Which seems like a massive pain, but I guess it's better than being hijacked by Russian spammers. Damn it. Why can't people just be nice? Anyway, if someone spammed you from my account last night, I apologize. Obviously, it wasn't me.

7 comments:

  1. Darn it. I read the email before I read the blog. If everyone at the NRAO says "smooge says your account is hacked in case you don't know..." sorry. gmail is more useful at this than I expected. By the way, what kind of password did you have previously? Number of characters and such.. [you can email me as its for research]

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  2. Did you go and tell everybody? Sigh. So much for hiding my embarrassment at being hacked the day after the security briefing. But, yeah, they were astonishingly efficient about it. I'm impressed.

    The password was... Well, I won't give it to you, but it was eight characters, with a mix of upper and lowercase, a number and a symbol, and nothing remotely like a comprehensible word, so I thought I was doing pretty good. However, I had also used the same password at a few other (possibly less secure) sites, which I am aware was extremely stupid, and was, in fact, just going to change. Only maybe I didn't do it soon enough. Learn from my fail, people!

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  3. *I* didn`t get any spam from your e-mail account. I feel so left out.

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  4. I can send you some myself if you like. :)

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  5. Oh, and Smooge, since I didn't say it before when I was bemoaning my embarrassment: thanks for being alert, even though it turned out not to be necessary. Jim did send me an e-mail at my work account letting me know you talked to him. Good to know people are watching my virtual back. :)

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  6. Yes, Sorry I just saw your hacked email this morning in my spam. I was going to tell you but figured you probably already figured it out :)

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