I'm preparing for a brutal Monday after what happened with my "hobby" gmail account. A notorious hacking group managed to hack into mine (with a very strong password) and from this I've learned 2 important things that others might benefit from;

1) Don't tie your e-mail to another e-mail account that can expose who you really are. Sounds obvious, right? But who wants to create 2 accounts just so you can recover one of them in case you forget your password? Google will not unlock your gmail account, you have to have a recovery e-mail address.

2) Don't keep a lot of old mail laying around. In gmail it's all too easy to simply remove the message from the inbox to keep the thread around in case you want to go back and review it. Almost everyone I know is guilty of having a horde of ancient e-mail.

Luckily I did most of the things right. If I don't get lucky tomorrow it's au revoir mesdemoiselles. Even if I do get lucky tomorrow I'm sure I'll be gun shy for a while. It's sad, really, but it's always something isn't it?

I always delete all messages in my hobby email every week as well as all PM's on here....don't know how much good that is but hopefully it helps.  I don't understand your point number 1...how is one email account tied to another?  Is the point that gmail wants Another email address for you
besides your hooby one just in case something happens to the hobby account?  I would guess you
don't want to give them anything that ties to you...if you forget your hobby account password then
so be it....you start over with a new account, right?  Anyway, good luck monday.

That's right, it's just a simple question asked when you create the e-mail account and promptly forget about it. I know I did.

Thanks for the well wishing. I wish, just for one day, I was an actor. I need an epic performance.

Someone else might avoid a similar problem by reading this. FWIW I would avoid using gmail for hobbying activities because of how they love to collect data.

Dude that sucks.  Thanks for reminding us to be safe.

How did you find out you were hacked?

When they got done doing the damage they deleted the whole account. At 11:30am I couldn't log in and by 12:30 it was clear from my other e-mail account what they have accomplished. By 1:00pm all I could do the rest of the day was damage control. The other e-mail account isn't on gmail and I still don't know how they got the contacts from that account. I've been reading about the group that Google said is responsible... a wicked bunch of cyber terrorists. It wasn't a personal attack, the object is to spread the word that they can do anything to anyone. I purposely won't mention who they are.

-- Modified on 2/13/2012 8:56:48 AM

Wow that is horrible to hear.  Sorry about your email.
I don't know if it has been covered here at some time or another but I browse on Firefox under their "Private Browsing" option.  It's easy and it never saves any data to the browser history or anything and you can easily go back into the regular browser, including the previous tabs you had open.  Doesn't really help with being hacked, but it might help to keep things from SO's if need be.

Chrome has a similar "incognito" option.

Well things didn't go all that badly. The guy I was most concerned about is a zealot Mormon but he didn't cut me lose for some reason. Maybe his boss... who knows.

One funny thing happened, one of my other company contacts just shrugged it off and basically said "who cares?"

It's amazing how different people from different cultures react.