Today, my boyfriend told me something truly disturbing. As a bit of background, he has two e-mail addresses, both with Yahoo. The first is for work. The second is for casual chat etc. Well, he got an e-mail to his casual address with the subject "Spiros, are you drowning in debt?" Of course, he didn't open it and now doesn't remember who sent it, since he deleted it. Here's the thing. He doesn't use his real name in that address,. He's also not an avid net user and never signed up to anything with it except Facebook, where, again, he used a different name, the one associated with that e-mail. So how did the person know that his name is Spiros? We've come up with a few answers and none of them are comforting. Very few people have that particular address. I'm pretty much the only one who even writes to it. We think that someone might have hacked into his computer somehow and read the messages that were sent to him, saying things like Hi Spiro etc. That, or someone hacked into my computer and saw the messages that we sent one another. I have two gmail addresses myself, and while the one from which I normally send wouldn't really cause a problem, my other one has personal information and is used mainly for bills etc. and I certainly wouldn't want a hacker knowing what's in there. Maybe, someone didn't see the messages but only saw one of our address books and picked his address at random, saw his name and used it. Either way, it means that someone's got our information! He did have a virus, a trojan/worm (maybe both not sure) that AVG detected and deleted, but maybe, it got to his stuff before we were able to install the antivirus program. A friend asked me if it deleted it or merely put it in the vault, but since Spiros has his laptop at home, I can't check it to find out.
All I know is that both of us are really scared and are taking precautionary measures. This is making me physically ill and it takes alot to do that. What if someone not only got into our e-mails but into our computers? I have important things in mine that are for me alone to know that could lead to identity theft if in the wrong hands. I've been using computers for 14 years and have never seen anything like this, and he's always been paranoied about such things, since he uses them only for basic tasks. If anyone has an idea of what happened or could help us in any way, please let me know either here or on my messenger which I will give below. Please do not send e-mails to those as I never check them. Also, should he delete the casual address and how do I change my passwords on my GMail accounts? I use the basic layout and went to settings but didn't see anything about passwords. Do I need to change to the other layout for that option to appear? Will I be blocked from using my Youtube account once the password on my GMail one is changed, since I used GMail to sign up for Youtube? How do I make certain folders password protected with XP Pro and can this be done on compact flash cards as well or only within the actual hard disk? Do I need to take important files and put them on a compact flash card that will only be used when I need to access said files or will password protection be enough to stop hackers? Finally, how do you change Passwords on Yahoo accounts? I know that Spiros wants to do this and I'm sure he won't know how if it's one of those things that takes forever to find, since he's really a novice with computers and is still learning English so may not understand certain technical terms. He's fully sighted so can follow instructions about icons and stuff. I'm assuming it's just a matter of finding an account and/or settings link but we all know how inaccessible Yahoo can be, so I'm not sure how well it would work with a screen reader if I were to attempt to help him. With appreciation, Eleni For answers to frequently asked questions about this list visit: http://www.jaws-users.com/help/
