Hacked! Stolen email messages


What a long tough day yesterday....

On Saturday while I was at evergreen taking pictures of a U18 club volleyball tournament, someone was busy hacking into my work computer! Damn them. They used my machine to log into my web hosting control panel and reroute all my incoming email to a disposable email address that I don't have access to. Fortunately 'email silence' is not a part of my life, so when it stopped coming in I noticed pretty quick. I spent all day yesterday figuring out how it happened (a hole in my firewall and a rogue VNC client). I also changed all my local and online passwords. They apparently were planning to use my ebay account to sell high ticket items, not deliver and stick me with explaining the sale. They needed to get my email (and for me not to get it) to make that work.

I've already sent email to most everyone on my mailing list about the lost emails, but if you sent me one in the last couple days and I haven't responded, please please resend it!

What does this mean to all of my wonderful friends and customers? Hopefully nothing, but here are some questions and my answers:

What about my Credit card number?
I want to make sure all of my customers understand that I don't do any credit card processing myself, so the financial information you provide when you order prints is not on my machine and therefore could not be stolen from me. (yay!).

What about my Email address?
It is possible that my email address book was copied. But I doubt it. I really think the focus of this attack was the ebay scam.


This was a big lesson learned for me, I locked down the security on my hardware firewall and the software firewall on my machine in a big way. I also stopped storing passwords for my online accounts in the browser.

Mac's may or may not be more secure than Windows, but none of them are hackproof. Be warned!

...And hopefully this never happens to you!

~Bill

Posted: Tue - February 27, 2007 at 08:18 AM          

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