A friend of mine has a Gmail account which was hacked into yesterday. Everyone in her address book was emailed with a plea for help - emergency, flight diverted to London due to technical difficulties, mugged at gun point, everything taken - please send some money to pay for hotel etc.
Because the hackers could access her gmail account - they even chatted on line with one of her friends - they had access to emails about her personal life - university credentials, her New Zealand travel plans, her address, it was all repeated in the scam email. I must admit that even I was taken in, although I am not usually that gullible. It was not until the request came to send money by Western Union that alarm bells started to ring. But the email was unusually plausible for a scam, and I know that others fell for it, although I do not think anyone lost any money, because the truth came out pretty quickly - I emailed her and asked her what she had given me for Christmas, an answer that only she, not the hackers, would have known.
But it has been a salutory lesson. The problem with services like Gmail, MSN, Hotmail etc. is that all email history is kept on-line. So if someone manages to hack into an account, there is a huge amount of "identity data" for them to steal. Personally, I use Outlook as a client, rather than Plusnet's webmail, so the risk should not exist. Except .....
Purely as back-up, I leave copies of all emails on the Plusnet mail server. So I am no better than she is ! So my question has to be, how secure is the Plusnet mail server ? Is there any risk of someone hacking in and gaining access to my historic emails also ? I suppose that it is just down to password protection. I do archive the old emails on the server by transferring them to another online folder, but frankly that is no protection unless I could add a further layer of security by password protecting the sub-folder. But I doubt if that is possible with Plusnet ?
Any thoughts / comments ?
