On being hacked and exchanging contracts.

I know it happens all the time all over the world, however I never thought it would happen to me! My Yahoo mail account (the one email account I’ve had for over 10 years) has been somehow hacked and it has sent spam to all my contact list. If you’re unfortunate enough to be one of them, I am terribly sorry

Thank god I’ve got a wonderful husband who understands the cyber world much better than me, and has given me a few pieces of advise on how to prevent this from happening again. I’ve changed my password (once again, the same password that I’ve had for over 10 years) for a more secure one and I will try to keep different passwords associated to different websites when they are connected to this Yahoo email account (basically, I won’t have the same password for the email and other websites)

Funny thing is that for the last 4 or 5 years I’ve been using my gmail account as my main account for personal mail and I just left the yahoo one for signing up to websites. So, everytime I have to register in a new website, I use the yahoo one. I should have tried to little by little delete my contacts list that I do not use any more, and maybe the extents of this “incident” would have been smaller. Now, I am not completely sure of how many people have received this spam email (selling a 2gb iPod I think) and I’m feeling a bit uneasy about going into Yahoo again!

On a separate note, today is Exchange Day. In the “buying/selling a house” world, this is when you exchange the contracts and is the step just before completion. Essentially what happens is the various legal parties agree what is going to happen on completion; who is buying what, from whom and for how much. The point is that there can be nothing outstanding in any part of the chain, otherwise the exchange will not take place. Thankfully, we don’t have a big chain (our buyers were renting, and could have easily moved with mum and dad if things/dates didn’t fall into place) and this has made things much easier and faster for us. Chains are known to go on for months until all parties can agree on a date that suits everyone.

So, fingers crossed and wish me luck for the big move in just one week!