Hijacked Email Account

​Over the last couple of weeks, I have had two different customers get their email account hijacked.  You can tell that your account has been hijacked if you receive many undeliverable emails from people you don’t know and/or your email password is no longer accepted.  This is often accompanied by your email service provider temporarily disabling your email service because of spamming.  There are a number of ways that your email account can get hijacked:
 

• Your email password is easily guessable
• You entered your email password into a phishing website
• Your email service provider had a security breach
• Your hacked email account used the same or very similar password as a different, breached site

 
Should this happen to you, you need to immediately do the following:
 

• Change your email password
• Change other passwords if they were the same or similar to your former email password
• Change any passwords that were contained in old emails
• Check your email settings so that the hijacker hasn’t defined an automatic email forwarder
• Notify your contacts that your email was hijacked and should they receive a strange email seemingly coming from you, not to open it without checking with you first

 
You may also notice that after all of this, legitimate emails you send out are not deliverable and get bounced.  This is due to your email account having been blacklisted in the Internet because of being detected as a spammer.  Normally this resolves itself after about 24 hours, but is obviously very annoying.