Were you one of the 711 million?

[Unicorn]

In today's news one of the major headlines was the recent hacking of 711 million email accounts.

Here's the link to the article.

http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/hacking/change-your-email-password-now-if-youre-on-this-list-of-711-million-accounts/news-story/3fecd838cbde75f59b6cad8d7d298f8b

I thought nah, wouldn't happen to me, but I used the check link in the article to find that yes, one of my 3 email accounts was in the 711 million so promptly rang my ISP and changed the account password.

Hats off to the person who did the hard yards in making it easy to see if you have been.

[trout]

The very last thing I would be doing is to punch my email address into a website about a hacking scam to check it :angel:

[JeffH]

Me too. I looked at the site an immediately closed that tab.

[Unicorn]

:laugh2: .. Yes, I'd thought that through before I did it. Since it was published in a news article they'd be crazy to put a bogus link in there without confirming whether it's legit or not. That combined with me running good up to date antivirus software just made me do it. The amount of spam emails that I receive already lets me know that the email address alone is well and truly out there, so not much to lose really. Since I immediately changed my email password afterwards I think I'm pretty safe. Oddly, not even anxious about it ..... how bizarre.

[JeffH]

Uni -not anxious! Are you trialing some new drug?
My Bigpond email was hacked some years ago and my computer was being used to send spam emails. I was getting in excess of 3,000 "undeliverable" messages a day.
Telstra was completely uninterested in helping so that was, for me, the 'straw that broke the camel's back' and I ditched them for another ISP.
Interesting thing was I had same speed, much bigger download limit and cheaper monthly fee with the new provider and they used the Telstra facility at the local exchange. So turned out a win for me.

[Unicorn]

:laugh2: Too true Jeff! I think the anxiety of wondering if any of my accounts had been hacked outweighed the anxiety of the risk of typing in my email address. I do agree that the site did look pretty elementary though. I checked all the kids addresses too and my daughters came up with info of a hack back in 2013, which from memory, was when she'd had a virus on her laptop. Took me days to get rid of that mongrel at the time.

[stevo1962]

I ran all my old workmates emails through it first and they all had been
part of the August 2017 hack