Hacked.

[Justin Passing]

One of my old email accounts, on Virginmedia.
I looks like (though there's no way to know I suppose) that someone or a bot hacked the password. In hindsight it wasn't the strongest possible, but better than most.

All the mails from a few days ago backwards, got deleted, and a few other settings cleared. Inbox and sentbox, all empty. The Virgin bloke, a belligerent character in an Indian call centre, got hostile when I expressed surprise that they don't keep a back up. It's their server that has lost the files, not my computer. He said he could see that it was a hack, but no more.

I have to assume that everything in 14 years of emails , is available to the hacker, including all attachments. I can't immediately think of anything which can do harm, but probably we all put stuff in emails which we wouldn't if we thought that the account might be hacked one day. Certainly I discussed lumps of money, within the family, but I don't think any sort of access info would have been there. I use several banks I'd better tell - which will probably only make things more difficult for me.

It wasn't a password I use anywhere else. No viruses detected, on 3 laptops and 2 phones
Can anyone think of something I haven't, that would be of advantage to someone else????
There would have been some copyright breaches, but no state secrets.

I would advise anyone to avoid Virgin anyway. They're bad for most things.

I had a website I run hacked, from the host's side, which was along with others of theirs. It was refreshed, with all transaction history, in a couple of days. I would have thought an ISP could keep a rolling year's worth of mail, say. All I can think of which is a loss, is records of when I've bought a few items - no big deal.

The cat's gonna have to get used to being called something very strange.

 

[Winglet]

Were there any mentions of your address in any of the Emails? I wouldnt want that getting out.

Or basically anything personal that they could use to help bypass bank account quesitons such as name of your dog, house name, favourite footballer, etc.

 

[Justin Passing]

Phone number on quite a few, address on some yes, various invoice copies/warranties/agreements in and out as attachments. Doubtless bank account numbers if you dug for long enough. You find those on a cheque of course. Jeremy Clarkson famously published his saying it was of no value to anyone else, and got a few debits from his account for his trouble.
One thing I've used is based on a house detail. Not sure if my NI number would ever have been there - probably not, but....

Google have recently started wanting people to use phone confirmation, and all the banks want you to use an app, which I have resisted, time for a rethink.
Time to break out old phone numbers and car registrations for passwords. I can remember several old ones better than recent.

I've called people I regularly get money from to tell them not to send anything elsewhere!

 

[motorbiking]

I think I posted a while back, I nearly lost £55k if I recall when a solicitor I was dealing with had their email hacked and redirected. I knew something was up when they responded straight away. It was the usual "can you pay the fee in to this account please" scam. I ended up phoning the lawyer directly who as I expected acted all lawyer like (read our disclaimer) in the end I contacted their CIO as the lawyer was convinced the hack was my end. I got an apology from their CEO, but haven't used them since given I wasn't convinced they knew how to fix it.

I would contact anyone who may respond to demands for money/information and advise them of the security breach. One way to make sure payment data is a tiny bit more secure is to use images rather than text. The spambots look for payment card data and scan for words like invoice, fee, payment etc.

 

[Winglet]

Definately worth enabling 2 Factor authentication on anything important.

National insurance number would be on pay slips if you get those sent to email at all.

 

[motorbiking]

knowledge of a matter + name and address is enough to scam someone.

e.g.

Hi [personal contact], I found this great deal where you can get 50% discount in screw fix by paying £200 to set up a VIP account. I've set one up and thought it would be great for your [something I know about] project. You can sign up here [insert fake screw fix site address].