I woke up with rather unwanted news this morning. I tried to check my email from my phone and got a message saying that my password was invalid. After a few tries, I simply reset it and was then informed that there had been unusual activity with my gmail account.
Well, fuck. This is the email account from which my whole online presence is registered. This is the one that gets all the password update emails and shit of the sort. The good news is that it seems that the chinese fuckers only hijacked my account to spam all of my contacts. The bad news is that I have to assume that every email I have sent and received from my gmail since 2004 has been compromised and copied. How… violating. Most of that is useless and trivial. But still. It means that I have to change every password that I have, just in case. So far, I’ve changed over a dozen, including my gmail, amazon, ebay, paypal, linkedin, facebook, skype, creditexpert, sourceforge, domain registrar and web host. I’m still debating if I need to change all of my secondary stuff, like Tesco and Dabs.
The really, really annoying thing is that I don’t know how they got my password. I’m generally on the lookout for scams or phishing, and my password isn’t susceptible to a dictionary attack. It’s a giant faff that I did not need today.