In the past week we have witnesses a huge increase in spam email, particularly from AT&T/BellSouth , Gmail, and sc.rr.com email accounts. What is really surprising is that some of these emails came from “top-notch computer geeks” and corporate executives. But Why?

First of all, more folks have email accounts with those 4 vendors than all of the other vendors put together. But the real root cause, these folks are not using strong passwords on their email accounts, and these are the people that should know better!

What’s happening? These email accounts have been hacked by organized crime to disseminate spam advertizing, for anything from legitimate products, to porn sites, to sites that can seize control of your computer and use it as a zombie for more spam. Once your email account has been hacked, the hacker has access to your email address AND your address book, and, you guessed it, they send this filth FROM: You TO: your friends and family. How nice!

But how do they hack email accounts? Not by sitting at a keyboard and trying various passwords. They write a script that does it for them. The script goes from email address to email address, and tries the obvious stuff. And when it gains access, it starts another script that sends out spam email.

What makes this possible is the fact that folks STILL don’t use STRONG PASSWORDS!.Instead, they use stuff like 123456, or abc123, or their name, or birth date. You see, simple alpha numeric passwords can be hacked by these scripts in 5 seconds or less. Simply using a combination of UPPER and lower case letters with numbers moves the time from 5 seconds to 5 minutes. To make it a strong password, though, it needs to be 10 or 12 characters long, and must have a mixture of UPPER CASE, lower case letters, numbers, and special characters like !@#$?*. Put that stuff in your password and you increase hack time from minutes to hours, and the hacker script gives up and moves on to the next.

Problem:

Bottom line is: The password must be impossible to remember and you should never write it down. How’s that for security – even the computer user can’t get into their own computer. OR they write it on a sticky note and stick it on the monitor for all to see. How secure is that!

Solution:

However, there is a system for creating and remembering strong passwords, Start off with your favorite saying such as:

Gladly Pay You Tuesday For A Hamburger Today. To create a strong password from your favorite saying, take the first letter of each word and alternate between upper and lower case, IE GpYtFaHt Now you have something you can remember. To really spice it up, change the first t to a 2 and the a to an @, and put ! at the end, IE GpY2F@H!. Now add the year of your Grandfather’s birth, and you have GpY2F@H!1883. And that’s the easy way to create and remember a strong password with 12 characters, upper and lower case with numbers and symbols. Hack that one spammer!

1. Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers just won’t get it!

2. Don’t use GpY2F@H!1883 – That’s my password! ☺

As for securing your existing email account, contact your email vendor, tell them that your email account has been hacked and ask them if simply changing the email address will be sufficient to secure the account. If not, you may need to get a new email account. However, if they will allow you to continue using your existing account, have them change the password. Then immediately change it again to your new strong password to secure your account.