I’m a fairly boring person. Very few sensitive emails pass through my Gmail account. But the story of a British designer who had his business thrashed by a hacker is giving me a little bit of pause. David Airey’s Gmail account was hacked, which has led to a hacker holding his domain for ransom. It’s a long story, but here’s the important part: go check your filters on Gmail right now. If there’s anything there that you don’t recognize, kill it. It’s probably good to check every now and again, too, until Google fixes this.
Longer explanation: after logging into Gmail, the victim visits a site that injects a malicious filter into your Gmail account. The filter can be for something as simple as “password” or as broad as “has:attachment”, and when the criteria are met, it sends that mail to the hacker, who then uses the information to ruin your life. Don’t let that happen.
It’s a slightly frightening story, and one that I just want to make sure you know about.
If they hack mine, they’ll find out that I’m crazy. I lead a secret life. Oops. I just let out the biggest secret right here.
g2g
LOL j/k BFF wth
Thanks for picking up on my story. I appreciate your support with this, and hope you have a fantastic new year.
[...] M’s blog, this is something every Gmail user ought to be aware of: After logging into Gmail, the victim [...]
That’s a bit more than mildly disturbing. Sure, the chance of stumbling across one of those pages is slim (we hope), but even so… I mean, all that freelance research I’m doing for the FBI and CIA — I don’t think the White House would be too happy if some hacker got into my e-mail…
I never open attachments in gmail. I always forward anything that I don’t recognize to a yahoo account because yahoo has an excellent spam filter. Is this enough to protect me?
Not necessarily. This hack happens because you go to an unsafe website after logging in to your Gmail account. It’s all online, there’s nothing you have to make the mistake of downloading to your computer. The best course of action is to stick to the sites that you trust until Google fixes this, and to check your filters in your Gmail account.