You’ve Been Hacked

Fellow Bloggers . . . Has this happened to you?

My Yahoo email account was hacked last week. While that’s bad news, it wasn’t disastrous. This  email hasn’t used in a long time, but I neglected to delete and left were contacts emails in it, including myself, which is HOW I found out that the account had been compromised. Grenville also got a suspicious looking email.

It’s our standing practice NEVER to open links in emails and by now most folks know NOT to send me any forwarded emails. Maybe it’s because I’ve told them they would be immediately deleted on receipt?

What to do If your email gets hacked — According to Yahoo Support the first thing you should do is change the password — DONE. My next step was to delete all contacts, bypassing the caution that this action could not be reversed. My final step was to delete the account entirely. Of course, Yahoo wanted to make sure . . .

We are sorry to see you go!
Are you sure you want to terminate your Yahoo! Account?

Sure DO. In recent months some friends and family have had email accounts hacked. This was a first for me, and showed the need for greater vigilance in opting whether or not to list contacts online.

I learned that IF you poke around an email account you can find out lots of stuff, for example, in Yahoo you can view your most often visited locations under Location History:

Lancaster,Pennsylvania,United States
Virginia,United States,23418
Onley,Virginia,United States,23418
Plainfield,New Jersey,United States
New London,Connecticut,United States,06320
Nashua,New Hampshire,United States
Cranston,Rhode Island,United States

I also found out that the account was hacked twice from Iran:

 
4:09 AM
Browser
Mail Access
Iran2.178.155.146

4:09 AM
Yahoo! Mobile
Logged In
Iran2.178.155.146

NOW, you would think that some sort of red flags would have gone up in Yahoo because of those orange exclamation points, which displayed online. My previous locations were only U.S. east coast.

Do you see Iran on my location list? I didn’t.

So the question is WHY is Yahoo making it this easy for spammers to hijack accounts?

Yahoo should have noted this unusual location and used security questions to validate identity. But, apparently they do NOT.

A simple rule set night be that users would be asked to validate identity if the login (even a successful one) is outside a certain mile radius of any prior location.

This is NOT to say that hacking couldn’t occur with my Gmail or internet provider email account, BUT so far it has not and hopefully will remain that way. But, as a precaution I have started changing passwords.

WHEN when you terminate a Yahoo account, this messages displays:

Yahoo! Account Terminated
Your account has been deactivated and scheduled for deletion.

Along with this wording: You no longer have access to this account, which will be deleted from our user database in approximately 90 days. This delay is necessary to discourage users from engaging in fraudulent activity.

GEE, maybe Yahoo should  have thought of that sooner?