Aloha Kakou,
A friend of mine recently had her email hacked, and asked for some guidance on what to do after this happened. Here are some things I’ve come up with:
- You’re probably thinking that the first thing to do is to reset your email password so that you can send out a warning to your contacts that you got hacked. But, I think it’s more important to ask yourself this question:“Did I use the same password for my email and ANY online financial accounts”?
If so, then your first action should be to contact your financial institutions (by phone) and explain that you believe that your password has been compromised and to temporarily suspend online access to your accounts. You might even want to change the account numbers if you can. - Once you’ve secured your financial accounts, then get your email password reset by contacting your email provider. Here are links to hotmail, yahoo and gmail for this. If you use another email provider do a search for<provider name> password reset.Make sure your new password is “strong“!
- Once you get access to your email again, send out an email to everyone on your contact list telling them to ignore the previous email(s) telling them about how to get prescriptions, make money quick , etc.
- Change all your other passwords now! Most folks use the same password for many different things (email, Facebook, banking, etc.). The bad guys know this and try the same password they used to hack your email to hack your Facebook page and everything else they can think of to spread their malicious stuff. And you really should have a different password for every system you logon to. At the very least make sure your banking passwords are unique.
Malama pono,
Da Haole Boy
