![]() ![]() Who hadn’t seen countless messages like this before? Which of her friends would really think that Deb would capitalize “Money,” type a paragraph’s worth of sentences with no spaces separating them, or say that she had gone to “Madrid in Spain”? And, indeed, the great majority of notes were warnings that her account had been hacked and was being used to send out fraud-spam some included gratuitous tips about the need to be more careful in online life.īut a touching handful of the notes came from people who took the plea at face value. Someone had obviously taken over her account and was using it as a crude spamming tool-or at least what we considered crude. I’m using her real e‑mail address because at this stage there’s no point in “protecting” it. The bogus message that had just gone out to me and everyone else in her Gmail contact list was this: In my inbox I found a message purporting to be from her, followed by a quickly proliferating stream of concerned responses from friends and acquaintances, all about the fact that she had been “mugged in Madrid.” The account had seemed sluggish earlier that morning because my wife had tried to use it at just the moment a hacker was taking it over and changing its settings-including the password, so that she couldn’t log in again. ![]() By that time, I was up and looking at e‑mail, and we both quickly saw what the real problem was. When she came back to her desk, half an hour later, she couldn’t log into Gmail at all. ![]() So she closed all programs, rebooted the machine, and went off to make coffee and have some breakfast. She hadn’t fully restarted the computer in several days, and thought that was the problem. When she opened it that morning to the Gmail account that had been her main communications center for more than six years, it seemed to be responding very slowly and jerkily. The previous night, she had put her computer to “sleep,” rather than shutting it down. On April 13 of this year, a Wednesday, my wife got up later than usual and didn’t check her e‑mail until around 8:30 a.m. ![]()
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January 2023
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