Todd Mintz: Brain Serial Blog

So, last week when I logged into my Gmail Account, I noticed the following:

I was concerned but my first thought was that this alert was triggered by one of the Twitter apps that I used to “beef up” my number of social connections. Anyway, I immediately changed my Gmail Password but thought nothing more of the problem until I saw the following in my email:

Then, I realized I had a problem.

I’m absolutely sure that I didn’t do anything obviously stupid to get myself hacked. However, here is what I think happened:

My Gmail password could have been more secure and what got me in trouble is that I used the same email / password when I registered at a whole bunch of different sites. If one of those sites gotten hacked (e.g. Gawker), it wouldn’t take much to attempt to login to my Gmail account and steal all my contact information (which happened). My computer was 100% virus free and wasn’t used to send the spam.

I’m not the biggest expert on email spam but I’m surprised that in 2011, some people in my circle of friends and acquaintances actually got a message with spoofed headers and content that would trip even the most mimimal spam filter. My other Gmail addresses that received these emails correctly marked them as spam and my Comcast email addresses didn’t even present them to me. I would hazard to guess that if you received this email, you’re also getting lots of other spam and that you might want to get a better filter because getting a large quality of this kind of crap email would be really annoying.

Plus, anyone who knows me knows my disdain for Apple and its products and that I’d never do anything to promote them :.)

Thanks for the folks who brought this to my attention and sorry for the inconvenience…

This entry was posted on Monday, January 10th, 2011 at 6:42 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.