Is your identity Safe?
Posted on : 25-05-2010 | By : Anderson Goncalves | In : Uncategorized
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Dear friends,
Earlier in January this year I mentioned that I had been a victim of hacking when I had several accounts compromised and also had one of my AOL email accounts hijacked, not to mention the commissions they stole from some of the affiliate programs that I promote.
Well, recently I have been bothered with this thing again. I will not go into further details here, but it seems that there is someone with bad intentions out there targeting Internet Marketers trying to mess up with our business and steal affiliate commissions. Last week they tried to steal my commissions from one of the companies which I am affiliate of and tried to screw up with my inbox forwarding me tons of safelists emails. It took me a while to clean that mess and set up my server to block those messages but it’s all Ok now.
I have already reported this to the authorities and also notified the companies and service providers where I had my accounts compromised about all of this.
Whoever is committing these acts they seem to use some ‘dirty’ tactics to try to hide their identity and they use other peoples information when hacking into someone else’s accounts. I had some of my profiles filled with someone else’s information when I took control of my accounts again. They also use several different PayPal emails to divert money to their PayPal accounts.
It’s just sad that some people instead of going after their own success and happiness in life prefer to damage other people’s success. I just can’t understand that mentality and I fell sorry for them.
I like to make things clear and I thought I should share with you what is happening and what I’ve been doing towards it.
Have a great day,
Anderson Goncalves
P.S. If you have been a victim of something similar what I recommend you to do right away is change you email account password for something unique and don’t use that password with anything else.
Sorry to hear that ,how would i know if it happens to me
Thanks James
Hello James,
Well, there are some things that you can do to avoid this. What I have learned from it is that it’s important to create a strong password for your email account and don’t use that with anything else, your email account is one of your most important online assets. When that happened I used to use a password for everything and now I have different passwords for the most important programs that I promote.
Something I started to do after that first happened was to create and keep a list of ALL websites and services that I am registered with and have that handy. So if you ever notice any suspicious activity in your accounts, you will know where to go to change your passwords and details.
Once in a while log into your profiles and check out if you PayPal email is correct. And also make sure you have a good Antivirus and Firewall installed on your computer and keep them up-to-date.
Good suggestions about passwords and checking your accounts. I had someone hack into my website recently. I learned that it’s vital that you backup your website periodically. Otherwise it can be a real mess to try to clean it up.
Here is where I blogged about my experience.
http://askralphlyon.com/home/2010/04/1-on-google-and-hacked-this-site-may-harm-your/
Great point Ralph,
That is SO important! I make a full backup of my website as well as databases at least once a month. That’s very easy to do using the backup feature on cPanel and this simple attitude can save time, unecessary rework and avoid big headaches if something unexpected happens.
Thank you!
I’m sorry to hear about your problems but can I suggest that it would be a good idea to cloak all your links as that way, people cannot replace your ID with their own and take your profits. I’ve heard of this happening quite a lot.
There are a number of programs you can use for this, but the one I’ve used above is below.
Ann
Hi Ann,
Thank you for your suggestion! I do use several link cloaking programs, however my problem was not related to that. In my case they tried to steal my commissions straight from the members area of the programs that I promote.
Sorry to hear of your hacker attacks again…
hopefully they will catch them through the paypal accounts..
Good advice…I would do well to think ahead to better security given your experience
Hang in there…