a little tip...

Last week my brother's email account was hacked and it sent out an email to everyone in their contact list asking for money because they were stuck in Spain, or something to that effect...I didn't open it.  That is just what I gleaned from the subject line.  And if you didn't know whether or not they were traveling, you may just believe it.  My brother and his wife have done some traveling with a soybean group and have been out of the country a couple times so it's not entirely unbelievable.

Both my brother and sister-in-law texted me about this over the weekend.  My kids heard me talking about it and asked what it meant.  You should've seen their faces when I told them that there are really 'smart' people out there who break into people's email accounts and try to get their friends to send money or steal other personal information they may be able to use to get into a person's financial accounts.  What?  Yes, kiddos, there are people out there using their talents for evilness!  It is so ridiculous...and frustrating!  You could tell they were puzzled and didn't get it...neither do I.

Along with the soliciting email, this hacker or virus erased their entire contact list!  Ahh.  I can't imagine losing all of my email addresses.  A similar incident happened to a friend a few years ago, and after that, I went in my contact list and printed it out.  I now store it in my address folder at work for safe-keeping.  I figure if that ever happens to me, I will at least have a list of the email addresses I had at the time I printed them. 

I have heard before that if something like this happens with Facebook, you should change your password right away.  I really don't know if this is true, but it can't hurt.  In fact, I now change my password every now and then just in case...but I wonder if now that they have all of those addresses, if you should go ahead and change your password because maybe they are working on getting into those email accounts?  Sorry, I'm not trying to cause paranoia, I'm just kind of thinking out loud on this one.

So my little tip for you is to take a few moments and print out your contact list.  Store it away for safekeeping.  You never know when someone, with obviously too much time on their hands, will decide to hack into your email account!