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Saturday, November 13, 2010

Real life application!!


So, in light of talking about passwords the other day, today I had a very unpleasant surprise. I got on my computer this morning, after a wonderful Worldwide Leadership Training Meeting, and tried to log into my E-mail. What I got instead was a message from Google saying I had had some suspicious activity on my account, and that I needed to type in a phone number for them to send me a verification text message. I did this, and then the account had me change my password. When I got on my Gmail account, I found an interesting E-mail that had been attempted to be sent, that I never sent. It only had a link to a website, and I deleted it immediately, because I'm pretty sure it was something malicious. Luckily Gmail had actually stopped those E-mails from being sent, and had shut down my account. This was why my Gmail was not immediately logging in, and why my blog was down earlier this morning. What it looks like is someone hacked into my E-mail in order to send something scary to my contacts. This was very troublesome, so I took the time this morning to go through and change my passwords on many different websites. Hopefully this won't happen again. :)

It just reaffirmed to me that Dr. Zapala knows what he is talking about, and that it's a good idea to have different passwords, and to change them often. It is frightening what people can do through the internet with malicious intentions, but it is also one of the most wonderful tools we have nowadays. Just be careful out there.

3 comments:

  1. Weird, I had the same thing happen a couple of weeks back with my Facebook account. I'm going to go through and follow Dr. Zappala's advice.

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  2. I had the same thing happen with my yahoo account recently...

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  3. The same thing happened with my gmail account on the same day that Dr. Zappala gave this lecture in class. Kind of weird.

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