E mail Caution

[chavez 641]

This is a bit of a precautionary warning. It is something that I hope never happens to any of the member of this board. It was something that happened to me and although it was detrimental to me it was far worse to another person.

I have use G mail for all of my private communications for a number of years. A few months ago Google changes some policied with reguards to G mail. I was perfectly fine with the way G mail worked in the past so I told myself that I didn't need to accept this change, I would simply change to a different e mail service and I choose hotmail because I observed that this was the service that many members used.

Everything worked fine for a few months and I continues my private correspondence.

Then something changed. I don't know why, I don't know how and I may never know. Frankly, now it doesn't matter.

Some how and for some reason someone broke into my HOTMAIL account. All of my correspondence was copied and forwarded to the email account that I share with my wife. Which she read and which she down loaded and printed on paper. I can only think that the person that did this thought that she was doing my wife a favor.

It was a very hurtfull thing to do. My wife was very hurt and continues to feel hurt to this day. She confronted me and I admitted everything without giving names.

Was it hurtfull to me. Not as much as one would think. My wife appologized for allowing our sexlife to decline to an non existant level. For the first time in 20 years she wanted to become involved in my sex life, to the point where I can hardly keep up. Where previously she was only good at recieving oral sex, she is now an enthusiastic particiant, giving some of the best head that I have ever recieved. She now participates in all sorts of variations that I have explored over the last few years. I am still a little hesitant to describe to her all of the practices that I have involved myself in in the past few years. They were plentiful and they were fun but I don't think she is ready for that.

I have only this regret. While in the hobbie I met a number of ladies that I liked and respected, not only for their sexual expertise but also for their personalities and friendship.

I would have liked to continue these relationships.

I have very few complaints about my present sexual satisfaction. I hate giving up my friendships and I hate what this person has done to my wife. Honestly this ' do gooder " has saved me thousands of dollars in my personal sexual satisfaction , but they have cost me much in my relationships and have done a great deal of hurt to my wife.

Since that unfortunate event I have learned that HOTMAIL is an easy target for crashing. I don't understand the reasoning behind what happened to me. I am confident that the intended result were not to improve my sexlife and to save me thousands of dollars, but that is not what upsets me. By this act of intrusion the perpitrator has done a great deal in injure my wife.

Now the other little (I hope little) problem with this incident this that my email identity that I used for hotmail was stolen. My password was changed and I cannot enter my hotmail address to retrieve mail or respond to mail. This part isn't a real problem because I prefer my G mail address anyway, but if the perpitrator is responding to my mail and sending mail with my identity , he/she can cause a great deal of problems.

This is the caution: If you are now useing hotmail for your private communication, maybe you should consider a different email provider. ... chavez

[Guest N***he**Ont**y]

Google reset hot mail password and click on the provided link. Take back that account and change the password and clean it out!

[Jabba 18389]

oooh, Chavez, so sorry this amount of hurt happened in your and your wife's life. Best hopes for both of you.

 

I don't understand how someone could hack into your hotmail account and cross connect to your shared account. Was your shared account a hotmail account or was there somehow mention of your regular email address in your hotmail communications?

 

I wonder also if there is any way to figure-out who hacked your email?

 

Best,

J.

[backrubman 64800]

...I don't understand how someone could hack into your hotmail account and cross connect to your shared account. Was your shared account a hotmail account or was there somehow mention of your regular email address in your hotmail communications?

 

The simple answer would be that if he ever forwarded something from their shared account to his Hotmail account then there would be a mention of it there somewhere. Sometimes these husband and wife accounts are pretty obviously just that (e.g. jimandjane[email protected]).

 

I wonder also if there is any way to figure-out who hacked your email?

 

Likely there are some footprints in the butter but they are difficult for non-technical people to find, see and correctly interpret. Hotmail always adds a generally hidden (but you can look for it) header on email you send (X-Originating-IP) which would contain the IP address (at the time) of the computer used to do the forwarding. But that information could trace it only in very general terms (e.g. we could maybe tell it was someone in another particular Country or the same city or town).

 

I can monitor my neighbor's Wifi and see everything they do including email addresses and passwords flying by (including a CERB account if one is a member) but I have better things to do with my time and it just wouldn't be right or proper to do so but I'll bet they don't know I could if I wanted to. I'm not even sure such an intercept is truly illegal unless I subsequently do something illegal with the information so collected.

 

I would have become emotional and shed some tears reading about this one if it weren't for a few positives mentioned but just the same, a load of hurt and pain has occurred and there is no undoing that now.

[April Dawn 12207]

I'm pretty sure "piggybacking" is illegal. (total thread jack) I recall taking a class that went into stuff like that.

 

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http://www.cfra.com/headlines/index.asp?cat=1&nid=37275

 

Cops Urge Computer Users to Protect Wireless Lap Tops

Josh Pringle

Tuesday, March 07, 2006 9:38 PM

 

Ontario Provincial Police charged a 25-year-old man last week under

Section 326 of the Criminal Code - "Theft of Communications."

 

The OPP allege the man was using his lap top computer to steal a

wireless Internet connection in Morrisburg.

 

Ottawa Police Hi-Tech Crimes Detective Marty DomPierre says "war

driving" is becoming popular. He says computer enthusiasts drive around

in their car with a computer open trying to locate an unprotected

wireless network to use.

 

DomPierre says if you are using a wireless network computer, you should

install a protection system on the network.

 

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http://newsfeed.recorder.ca/cgi-bin/LiveIQue.acgi$rec=17124

 

Telecommunications theft charge laid

 

MORRISBURG -- A 25-year-old Barrie man faces a charge of theft of

telecommunications after a dark-coloured vehicle was reported parked on

the residential streets in the village of Morrisburg Thursday evening.

 

The occupant was operating a laptop computer.

 

The man will appear in Morrisburg provincial court on May 2.

Posted via Mobile Device

[backrubman 64800]

I'm pretty sure "piggybacking" is illegal. (total thread jack) I recall taking a class that went into stuff like that.

 

Agreed. That's theft of service... but if I don't actually connect to their wireless Internet and use it but simply see and observe the traffic passing (even by accident in the course of investing a problem with my own wireless network) by then it gets into a pretty grey area as I only listening to a broadcast that is coming through my walls into my home :)

 

Go one step further, let's say they have an encrypted network... So I employ Amazon's Elastic Compute Engine processing power to crack the encryption key (costs $1.68 of CPU time or so) if I haven't piggybacked on their internet still not sure if the laws have kept up with technology here or any would really apply. Oh sure, if I log into some service using their compromised credentials and start doing stuff (like forwarding emails) I must be doing something illegal? Well, immoral for certain and in this particular case completely repugnant and abhorrent.

 

Amazon EC2 helps researcher to crack Wi-Fi password in 20 minutes

 

I guess I am kind of on a mission with this one as from my home office with the appropriate directional antenna I can hit about 150 different WiFi networks, only about half of them are encrypted and of course even if they all were it's kind of like taping a door shut as opposed to locking it.

 

So my wife gets a new tablet, takes it out of the box, turns it on and it connects to the neighbour's Wifi automatically (as ours is encrypted and we haven't yet told it the key) and starts downloading an update -- true.

[Phaedrus 209521]

Thanks for sharing, Chavez. That sounds like it could have been absolutely disastrous - and also sounds like someone wanted it to be disastrous for you.

 

I used Hotmail when I first joined CERB - but after having a couple of hotmail accounts cracked (just by spammers, fortunately) in the space of six months, I went to gmail and stayed there. As others have said, Hotmail has a horrible reputation for getting cracked, although I confess I have no idea why this should be.

 

It's a good idea to keep your email account as clean as possible. No matter what service you're using, work on the assumption that your password will fall into the hands of the worst possible person right about... now. It's not possible to delete everything immediately, of course... but once an encounter's done, delete all the emails exchanged previously. Don't forget to clean your "sent items" folder, and then empty the trash.

 

Also, password hygiene is very important. Pick a strong password. Length is far more important than incomprehensibility ("CERBisareallyfunplacetohangout!" is actually a MUCH harder password for machines to crack than "arHJDFH%#@$%fkASDF87T56", and it's a lot easier to remember too. There's a lot more on this at this site (originally posted in this thread).

 

Finally, Do NOT re-use your email password for any other site or service. It's good policy to have different passwords for everything, but that's REALLY important for your email. The reason for this is that, given the way everything works these days, your email address is essentially your online identity. We use it to sign on to all sorts of websites. And that means that once someone has access to your email account, it's trivial for them to find and reset the passwords for your accounts on in sorts of other places too: social networking, shopping, banking... everything! And so if there's one password you really want to have secure... it's email.

 

Edit: one more final thing: don't access your email from your smartphone. Yes, that's inconvenient. But if you also use your smartphone for your "real life" stuff, there's a high risk of some app pillaging your email for other addresses and phone numbers so that the can suggest more friends/contacts for you (and not so they can enhance your social graph to better target their advertizing, oh no...). See this thread for a cautionary tale.

[chavez 641]

Thanks to all for the concern and advise. This was much more than I expected.

I posted this as a way to hopefully help others. As so often happens in life, I recieved much more back that I gave.

I appreciate the concern and I will use the advise and I hope that others will do likewise..... thanks ...chavez