Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Hacked email account

Apologies and thank you to my friends on here that let me know. Microsoft promise me that it is frozen for 30 days !

Time to exercise another private one .

I guess Richards email might have been hacked.
The modern nerd world is a horrible thing.

I just say this as a general note, it is so common now that peoples online identities are hacked.
It causes so much personal distraction, wasted time and anger that I do want to make a noise for all of us.

If you get an email from him as I have you might like to

1. Do not reply to it.
2. Change your own email password (when did you last do that!!) NOW.
3. Make certain you consider all emails from anyone in context.

The email I got did not speak "Devon" so was clearly not from Richard. Among this modern AI cobblers this is a critical thing to think about. Would that person say those words in that manner?

I have suffered this on some of my public ID's and it is TEDIOUS. Please take a moment to hit the "forgot my password" link and use this to set a new password on all your accounts. On your key sites, anything with your credit card stored, bank, identity information (DoB, NI number) this is critical.

Sorry Richard, not meant at you. It's an element that cranks my handle, just to highlight how it is so easy to become complacent and not protect ourselves on line.

Alistair, thank you I shall get onto that tomorrow morning as I am always pleased to listen and act on sound advise,

Just to add to Alistair's great advice, also make sure that for anything critical, ensure that 2-Factor authorisation is also set up so that even if they have your password they will still need access to one of your physical devices like your smartphone.

I don't know if Windows does this (I expect it does but I've never bothered to look), but on Macs there is not only a built-in password manager that generates strong passwords for you, but also a very handy 'Hide my email address' feature which creates a dummy email for you to use on sites that then re-directs to your Apple mail account. That way you don't have to give your real email address to anyone you don't know.

Thanks Tim, I have 2 Factor on .some Windows (Desktop Windows 10) critical one's but I need to review the others as a matter of urgency.

I will not bank or pay with the phone as my background tells me anything that is transmitted over the air is readily detected with or without encryption which is only a matter of time to decipher if the will (money) is there.

Msoft are threatening not to support and upgrade Windows 10 on my sturdy and totally reliable Dell Desktop c20yrs which is where the work is done, so probably be forced to chuck a couple of french fries at it to take care of Windows 11 sometime.

The Inland Revenue, DVLA etc can take their chance as far as I'm concerned as they are well down the food chain tbh..

I just logged in specifically to see if there was some mention of this.

I received an email on the tm-img gmail account (I actually did not notice that this account was the one used) as follows:
No alarm bells rang and I replied to the email address, which was correct, thinking it was about Morgan cars or the Moto Guzzi rally last weekend. Unfortunately I gave WhatsApp, Telegram and phone number details.

I then recieved the following reply and the alarm bell rang. The email address was all correct but it just seemed really off.

Note that neither email I received actually mentions my name even though I signed with my name on my reply. Probably indicates a quick cut and paste job.

A quick search on the internet revealed this scam is not unusual. Apparently the scammers then sell the gift vouchers. Another alternative may take you to a fake site that gathers your details.

My suggestion to anyone who has been hacked would be to create an etirely new email address, obviously with a different password, and to go through changing the email address in all the accounts that they regularly use. I have several email addresses and now use one only for logins that are important for security, others I use for unimportant sites that may be less secure. That way there is less chance of breeched security spilling to important accounts.

Peter,
You recieved the same Emails from Richard hacked account I (and some other TM-members) recieved yesterday.

Sorry Peter for the hassle over this.

Thank you for your sound advise - as with Alistair, Tim and yourself I have learnt an awful lot about security in a very short space of time and am very grateful to you all as this is serious stuff.

Once more the TM team proven to be the fourth blue light service - feeling thankful and a contribution on the way to here and the gallery once I get sorted

Yes, thanks for the prompt Alistair. I've changed mine now. I hadn't received anything from Rich and have no evidence of compromise, but security standards have changed a lot since I first set it.


I've mentioned this before but worth repeating. If you register your own domain you effectively get as many email addresses as you like. I use a unique address with an auto-generated password for every login I create. I have a "catchall" which redirects the addresses to my gmail account, but if any of them is compromised I can disable that particular email through the control panel.

I'll admit it requires some technical knowledge to set up, but if you have the ability, it's well worth doing. I pay £8.99 a year for a .UK domain and £20 p.a. for the hosting, which I consider much better value than a VPN or Anti-Virus package.

Ian, a timely reminder and once the fallout is dealt with I will do this - a neighbour who still works from home has done this and swears by it.