A couple of days ago my Gmail account was hacked. I was actually lucky though, as I caught it rather quickly. The person who hacked my account promptly began to send out mass emails to my entire contact list. The emails being sent out were to 5 or 6 of my contacts per email.
Luckily, I was on Gmail at the time and the first email that the hacker sent was returned with a Mail Delivery Error. I promptly changed my password. I checked my “Sent Mail” folder and nothing was there. It turns out, the hacker also deleted the emails from the sent mail. But when I looked in the Trash folder, I noticed that only about 10 emails were sent out. So out of the 1500 or so contacts I have in gmail, only about 50 of those contacts were spammed.
Now you might be thinking to yourself, “well you probably had a weak password. I don’t have to worry about getting hacked because I have a really strong password.” I can assure you, my password was not weak. It was 14 characters long with UPPERCASE letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. It definitely wasn’t my strongest password, but it was far from weak.
If your account has been hacked, I have a list of changes/checks I made in order to verify that nothing was altered:
- Change your password as quickly as possible. (Mail Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Change Password)
- Change your password recovery options. (Mail Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Change Password Recovery Options)
- Check your signature for any changes that might have been made. (Mail Settings -> General -> Signature)
- Check to make sure your vacation responder is disabled and empty. (Mail Settings -> General -> Vacation Responder)
- Check your “Send Mail As” account and verify it is the correct email address. (Mail Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Send Mail As)
- Check your filters to make sure no new filters were added. (Mail Settings -> Filters)
- Check to make sure mail forwarding is disabled or as setup to your liking (Mail Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP -> Forwarding)
- Check to make sure POP and IMAP are either disabled or setup to your liking (Mail Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP -> POP Download or IMAP Access)
The above steps should be all that is needed in order to get your hacked account back to normal. I would suggest 1 additional step to ensure that your account stays secure in the future. I strongly encourage you to setup google’s 2-step verification on your gmail account (http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=175197).
Related articles
- Hacking Epidemic: No Joke, Lock Down Your Gmail Now (theatlantic.com)
- What To Do When Your Email Account is Compromised (ghacks.net)
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Gmail suffered a short outage on Friday.
Support for the social networking Google+, such as Hangouts, were also interrupted. In accordance with Reuters, the services were inaccessible in India, Britain as well as the United States. Users looking to sign into Gmail were greeted with an error information.
On Twitter, consumers complained that they definitely failed to access their e-mail. The hashtag #whengmailwasdown were connected to jokes regarding having to sign onto conversation services offered by AOL. Yahoo Inc. posted a screenshot of Gmail's error message on its Twitter account.
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