So my email was hacked on Monday and oh boy, was that a fun mess to try and clean up. (I’m being facetious. There was nothing fun about it.)
Anyway, the hacker sent everybody in my contact list an email saying that I’d been mugged in a park in Wales, and that my flight left in a few hours, and I needed money soon to pay the hotel, which was holding me hostage for non-payment. You know what heartless sticklers those Welsh hoteliers are. Apparently the American embassy was also turning a blind eye to my predicament.
The logical fallacies in this approach are numerous, and perhaps the least of the problems was that the email was riddled with grammatical errors and sounded nothing like me. And you can bet that were I ever to be mugged in Wales, the last way I’d deal with it would be to send a message to everybody I’ve ever emailed, including former bosses and boyfriends.
Aside from the obvious embarrassment of people thinking I’m the sort of person who begs for money from ANYBODY, having my email hacked means that somebody had access to my information. I emailed myself my password for bank accounts and credit cards. Not smart! Luckily, our hacker was kind of an idiot and didn’t think to try to steal from me, instead of my contacts.
But it wasn’t just the email. Our hacker friend also tried chatting with anybody and everybody on gchat. My friend TL caught on to the ruse pretty quickly, since you know, I speak English and the hacker didn’t.
TL: What’s your birthday?
Hacker: what is all this question all about i need you to get me out of this mess
TL: Try to get a real life, rather than getting free money from other people.
Hacker: your mama mamama your father your mama is here with dog ****ing are
You stay classy, email hacker.
The moral of the story is to make your password about three years long, very hard to guess, and keep your sensitive information out of your email. Also, keep in mind that if your gmail account is compromised, there is very little support to get it back. There’s nobody you can call, and your communication with Google is also sent to the compromised account. The hacker will change your security question and secondary email. I’m just lucky Kurt has computer smarts, or else y’all would probably still be getting emails in which “I” blithely ask for $1500 loans.