Tried to log into one of my gmail accounts last night and got a message saying my account had suspicious activity and I had to authenticate it. After doing that I logged on and found that someone had sent a single spam message using my account. It was one of those typical fake ones to someone on my contacts list, you know "Hello X, you should click this link. We are friends. My English is poor." That was the only message and I assume the account got locked after that. I fully scanned my computer with no results, and I haven't seen anything else that would suggest my account has a keylogger or virus, so I assume my password was hacked using the brute force "computer guesses every possible combination of letters and numbers until it gets it right" method.
What worries me is that I had some old emails saved on that account containing information that I wouldn't want falling into the hands of a nefarious evil-doer. If the hacker read through these emails, they would know:
-My name, address, and phone number.
-That I have a credit card with a certain company and the last 4 digits of that card.
-Some receipts from Amazon, hotels.com, Steam, H&R Block.
-Various login information for several websites, none of which I visit anymore or have personal info related to them.
It's also possible that the same password for my email could have been used for some other accounts. From the time the spam email was sent to the time I authenticated the account and changed the password was about 12 hours. I imagine a lot of this hacking and spamming stuff is automatic, but is it possible a real person was actively looking through my account? Should I be worried that some of my info has been compromised, which could easily lead to more info being compromised in the internet age?
What worries me is that I had some old emails saved on that account containing information that I wouldn't want falling into the hands of a nefarious evil-doer. If the hacker read through these emails, they would know:
-My name, address, and phone number.
-That I have a credit card with a certain company and the last 4 digits of that card.
-Some receipts from Amazon, hotels.com, Steam, H&R Block.
-Various login information for several websites, none of which I visit anymore or have personal info related to them.
It's also possible that the same password for my email could have been used for some other accounts. From the time the spam email was sent to the time I authenticated the account and changed the password was about 12 hours. I imagine a lot of this hacking and spamming stuff is automatic, but is it possible a real person was actively looking through my account? Should I be worried that some of my info has been compromised, which could easily lead to more info being compromised in the internet age?
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