AskBillFirst – Non-Tech Speak Technology Blog

Lately it seems more and more e-mail accounts have been hijacked and are being used to send out spam. Most of these e-mail accounts have been web based accounts, like Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail and AOL.

What happens is that someone gains access to an e-mail account and begins to send spam to everyone in the address book. It doesn’t just appear to come from you, it actually is coming from you.

How do you know it’s happening? Well, first you might have a lot of undeliverable messages coming to your inbox. Then, you’ll have some people in your address book ask you if you meant to send what they just received from you. If this happens, what should you do?

First, don’t assume you have a virus on your computer, especially if you do your e-mail over the internet. However, that being said, it’s not a bad idea to do a malware scan with Malwarebytes and SuperAntiSpyware. Then you should change the password to your e-mail account. This should stop the spam coming from you.

One of the big dangers of passwords is that most people use the same password for all of the websites they log into. If someone stole your password, they’d have access to every site you log into with that password. Always use different passwords for each and every site you sign up for. Fortunately, there are password programs, like Roboform and Keepass which will let you store your passwords on flash drives or locally on your computer and will also generate passwords for you for different sites and remember them so that when you access that site again, it will autofill the login so you don’t need to remember the password.

In general, it’s a great idea to change your password for various sites a couple of times a year anyway. These sites include e-mail accounts, social networking sites and banking sites. It may seem like a hassle, but compared to trying to clean up after someone has stolen your data, it’s a quick way of protecting yourself online.

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