Had the account for ten yrs or more, never had any problems. Went to log on tonight and password was incorrect. Managed to retrieve account thro a password reset. Appears my email address has sent out loads of emails with various links to most of my address book. Does this mean somebody has had access to my entire inbox etc?

My Yahoo account got done today as well, got an alert from Yahoo to say my account had been accessed from India.

I assume they copy your address book but once you’ve changed the password it should all be good again.

N.b I know nothing about IT and will be corrected soon

My missuses’ aol account was done about 3 months ago. We found out ’cause a mate rage me at 6am on a Sunday to see why we were in Barcelona and if I’d hit the mugger back and if we really needed money western union-ed to us.

Anyway, turns out, after a lot of paranoia, my good lady uses the same password for all the sites she visites. Shopping, shoes, sainsburys, email, mumsnet, ….. All the same.

Anyway, that’s the first part of the fix. Different passwords for the key stuff.

#Edit- just thinking about it – suppose you register here as jooeymtb with an email of Joe@aol.com and use a stw password of marmalade, then its as clear as day that any dubious fecker at stw will have a stab at paypal, gmail, aol etc with those details.

Yup it was a basic password for the email, but the banks and my bloody iTunes account (damn kids) are mi5 level safe. Just concerns me if they’ve been rooting thro the saved emails and sent stuff as there’s copies of the kids emails and passwords in there. Is it all done automated or is some grubby **** trawling thro your inbox for a pic of your mrs on the trap 😆

IME – Anything visible thru aol webmail is now theirs. Most probably just email addresses, credit card numbers,… I doubt they’re interested in photos. Kids stuff may be more worrying. You can search aol for anything relating to your address. Which would be my biggtest worry.

The trouble if they have access to your normal email is that if they hit password reset on bank/itunes/whatever then it could quite possibly come to the email that they can now read.

Gmail does something called two factor authentication where you sign in with your password, then provide a code generated by your phone that changes every minute. Much more secure if you have the option.

#Edit- just thinking about it – suppose you register here as jooeymtb with an email of Joe@aol.com and use a stw password of marmalade, then its as clear as day that any dubious fecker at stw will have a stab at paypal, gmail, aol etc with those details.

WTF?

For the record, your passwords are encrypted even from us.

Mark – no aspersions in your direction at all. It was just meant as an example.

What I mean really is that she had the same password for velux blinds, boden, M&S, uggs, ….. other stuff even I’ve heard of… but someone somewhere online got her password and tried it against her registerted email where it worked.

And for the record, it wasnt STW – she doesnt post on here.

It all starts with the pron – stay away from the pron!

(or use Sandbox) 😉

passwords in most systems are encrypted, so attacks from within are less likely. when you use an email address as a login, you’ve given away half the game – if the second half is a very weak password – then a dictionary attack will have you in within a shortish period of time. key thing is strong passwords – I go with a min of 11 characters with a number sequence that is not traceable to me. It amazes me when people say it’s just email, the details that are within the average mailbox are often a treasure trove for the unscrupulous