A word of warning - google account hijacked

Today I don't have a chile pepper story to share. Instead I want to alert you to check your privacy and safety on the Internet.

This message greeted me good morning when I logged into my google mail this morning.

First of all, I didn't really understand. But then I saw that my mailbox was full with returned e-mails. So someone had been sending out spam from my account. This is of course not fun for me, but it's also not fun for my friends receiving garbage e-mails.

I don't know how they did it. And actually I don't know how to protect me from future attacks. But I'm going to do this from now on:

• Use more complex passwords. Longer, with a mix of upper and lower case, and numbers and so on.
• Change password on a regular basis.
• Think about which communities I'm participating in. And try to better understand how it affects my privacy on the Internet.

To my friends who got the spam. My apologies for that, but most of all let's see what we can learn from this in order to be safer in the future.

Any other ideas and tips are appreciated!

Regards,

  Mats