Hijacked accounts and Noton 360 help please!

ClaireLR

I have posted yesterday this thread

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?p=14733811&posted=1#post14733811

To cut a long story short my ebay and hotmail accounts were hijacked and someone was using my ebay account to sell.

I'm just wondering out of interest how this could have happened? I understand that there are ways of finding out email addresses but how do they get your passwords??

Also, I have Norton 360, when I open it I get a screen saying my Identity protection, PC security and PC tuneup are all protected, but my back up is not (I dont have any blank discs at the moment), is there anything I need to tweak on Norton to help to prevent this happening again in the future?

Thanks!

Airwolf1

This happened to my brother-in-law a few weeks ago. His ebay account got hacked, and he used same password for his yahoo account. I guess by now that if you did have same passwords, you've changed them both (ebay and hotmail) and have separate passwords now? How they get your passwords? It depends on what your password is, but some people use month and year of birth etc, so some are easy to work out.
If there was a keylogger on your system, Norton would pick up on it straight away (I've tried it just for curiousity's sake) and delete it. I'd say if you've changed your passwords to something totally obscure, you'll be ok.

ClaireLR

Thanks for the reply. I also had the same password on ebay and hotmail (stupid I know but I find it hard to remember them all!) they have now been changed. The thing is it wasn't anything easy, the password, I know a lot of people use their name and date of birth or something, but mine was a 7 letter word that had nothing to do with anything, it was just a random word! SoI'm a bit puzzled to be honest.

I've scanned the computer about 10 times today, I feel sooooooo paranoid now, and keep logging into ebay and hotmail just to check that I can!

Airwolf1

As long as you've changed the passwords to separate ones now, don't let it get to you, although I realise it can be annoying. I assume no trading was carried out when your ebay was hacked into? My brother-in-laws was, it was Italian paintings he was(n't) selling. I had to chat on-line to ebay who restored his rating (or whatever it is called) and they also emailed the people who had bought items from him.
Also ensure if you use paypal, that you have a different password for that too!