On getting your email account hacked

That sucks to hear about your email account getting hacked. It happened to me once to an old email account from high school and everyone I grew up with and hadn't talked to in 10 years got an email from me recommending Viagra.

Anyway, I just wanted to remind you to change your password.

Don't make your new password an English word like 'password'. Hackers can do what's called a 'dictionary attack' where they just try logging in over and over using every word in the dictionary as the password.

Instead use a mixture of Uppercase and lowercase alpha numeric characters. Create a phrase that you can remember and swap out some of the letters for numbers that have a similar appearance.

So for example: Th15IsmYP@55w0rd

Which would read 'this is my password'

If you have a good enough memory you can just grab 8 or more characters from this password generator.

Also, never share the same password between accounts. If you have any other accounts (bank, other email accounts, etc) which use the same password as your hacked email account change the passwords on those accounts immediately.

Also, here is a great comic from XKCD and thread on security.stackexchange.com on creating safe passwords passed along by Oscar Godson.

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