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Password compromise

Steve Reed

Senior Member
Had an email from google today saying some of my passwords had been compromised. I have run various checks and it appears to be genuine. I am advised to change the passwords for two sites, one is BFW and the other is a fishing club I am a member of. Not sure if this is just me or also a problem for others on here.

Steve
 
I had an e.mai supposedly from “Apple “saying similar, but it quoted a password I had changed some 12 months ago. No doubt somebody trying it on, it gets rather tedious blocking message senders and phone numbers , I must get two or three a week from various places.
These people must be making money from these scams, I recall a DHL scam that looked very genuine, apart from the fact we were not expecting any delivery.That was deleted and blocked .

David
 
I think it's a scam too, I had similar ones recently purporting to be from Hermes, from DPD, from HSBC to name just three.

BUT, if you are in doubt just change your password anyway. IF you would rather leave your password because it's an "easy" one for you to remember, think again and change it!!

Ok, I may be a tad nerdy to some :D, but I have 400+ passwords (yes 400). All different and I use a password generator for these - see below. How do I remember these? of course I don't, I keep them on a flash stick and NOT on my computer. A few years ago I took my laptop and flash stick on hols (as normal) but when I got there it was not in my laptop case. Fearing the worse I changed about 100 passwords, those more important than others. When I got back home two weeks later my neighbour gave my my flash stick which he found in the road just behind where my van was :rolleyes:

I might add that my stick does NOT contain banking passwords.

Password generator :

clickety-click here

It's not difficult to use and it will tell you how strong your password is - drag slider to chosen number of characters, select whether you want letters, mixed case (upper case / lower case), punctuation characters, numbers - reccommend all of these.

Then click the refresh button (circular with arrows) until you see one you fancy. Then copy it and paste it into your password field on any site.
 
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The best one I was sent was an email that seemed to come from Facebook. The email looked like two Facebook friend requests, you were advised to click on the person to see who they were. The sneeky buggers had made up people or got lucky that had the same surname as remote family members in Australia. I was ultra careful logged onto my Facebook account and searched for both names from the cities they were from. Nobody by those names existed anywhere on FB. I suspected when I clicked on either link all sorts of nasties would have occurred.
 
If you use Google chrome, go to your password manager in settings and it will tell you there if any of your passwords have been potentially comprised 👍
 
Did this and this and the two compromised passwords are reported. This is why I suspect the email was genuine.

Steve
It is possibly genuine if Chrome is reporting it. If you've used the same password elsewhere for other sites and one of those has been compromised in some way, Chrome will identify where else it's been used (that's my understanding anyway).

Certainly a good idea to update your password.
 
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