{"id":114,"date":"2011-04-27T09:57:23","date_gmt":"2011-04-27T15:57:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mattdturner.com\/wordpress\/?p=114"},"modified":"2011-05-12T14:41:13","modified_gmt":"2011-05-12T20:41:13","slug":"what-to-do-if-your-gmail-account-gets-hacked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mattdturner.com\/wordpress\/2011\/04\/what-to-do-if-your-gmail-account-gets-hacked\/","title":{"rendered":"What to Do if Your Gmail Account Gets Hacked"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A couple of days ago my Gmail account was hacked. \u00a0I was actually lucky though, as I caught it rather quickly. \u00a0The person who hacked my account promptly began to send out mass emails to my entire contact list. \u00a0The emails being sent out were to 5 or 6 of my contacts per email.<\/p>\n

Luckily, I was on Gmail at the time and the first email that the hacker sent was returned with a Mail Delivery Error. \u00a0I promptly changed my password. \u00a0I checked my “Sent Mail” folder and nothing was there. \u00a0It turns out, the hacker also deleted the emails from the sent mail. \u00a0But when I looked in the Trash folder, I noticed that only about 10 emails were sent out. \u00a0So out of the 1500 or so contacts I have in gmail, only about 50 of those contacts were spammed.<\/p>\n

Now you might be thinking to yourself, “well you probably had a weak password. \u00a0I don’t have to worry about getting hacked because I have a really strong password.” \u00a0I can assure you, my password was not weak. \u00a0It was 14 characters long with UPPERCASE letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. \u00a0It definitely wasn’t my strongest password, but it was far from weak.<\/p>\n

If your account has been hacked, I have a list of changes\/checks I made in order to verify that nothing was altered:<\/p>\n

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  1. Change your password as quickly as possible. (Mail Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Change Password)<\/em><\/li>\n
  2. Change your password recovery options. (Mail Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Change Password Recovery Options)<\/em><\/li>\n
  3. Check your signature for any changes that might have been made. (Mail Settings -> General -> Signature)<\/em><\/li>\n
  4. Check to make sure your vacation responder is disabled and empty. (Mail Settings -> General -> Vacation Responder)<\/em><\/li>\n
  5. Check your “Send Mail As” account and verify it is the correct email address. (Mail Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Send Mail As)<\/em><\/li>\n
  6. Check your filters to make sure no new filters were added. (Mail Settings -> Filters)<\/em><\/li>\n
  7. Check to make sure mail forwarding is disabled or as setup to your liking (Mail Settings -> Forwarding and POP\/IMAP -> Forwarding)<\/em><\/li>\n
  8. 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)<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The above steps should be all that is needed in order to get your hacked account back to normal. \u00a0I would suggest 1 additional step to ensure that your account stays secure in the future. \u00a0I 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).<\/p>\n

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