When a hacker deletes all your Gmail messages

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20120215-245/when-a-hacker-deletes-all-your-gmail-messages/

By Elinor Mills
InSecurity Complex
CNet News
October 13, 2011

Many people are concerned about hacked e-mail accounts (even 
celebrities), but what about when several years worth of your digital 
file cabinet are deleted, say, by a malicious intruder?

That happened to Deb Fallows six months ago, and her husband, author 
James Fallows, wrote a riveting account of their ordeal for The Atlantic 
that makes for fascinating reading.

His words of advice are: use strong, unique passwords on important 
important online accounts; take advantage of Google's two-step 
verification service; and back up our cloud-based data on our own. Oh, 
and act fast. Deleted messages are purged from the Trash folder after 
about a month.

In a nutshell, someone somehow got a hold of his wife's Gmail password 
and sent scary "Mugged in Madrid" messages to her contacts (including 
ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who sent a "terse" e-mail to the author with 
the subject line of "Deb's e-mail has been hacked"), diverted her 
incoming messages to an outside account and pretended to be her in 
e-mail exchanges with concerned and or dubious friends and family. The 
hacker then deleted six years worth of correspondence. Poof!

[...]


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