in which our heroine is a bit of an idiot

[raven]

Dear friends, I have been meaning, as you do, as you mean to do your taxes, and see about registering with a dentist, and rescrewing your bike-light mounts, as you do, as you mean to do, to change my passwords. For a while. I'd get around to it, thought I.

On December 6th someone who wasn't me took £496.13 out of my account.

The bank, and PayPal, have been very nice about it, and they tell me I should have the money back pretty soon. (PayPal's customer service impressed me rather a lot: I rang them up in a panic and a nice man from Ireland said, before anything else, "We do this every day. Now you just sit down and don't worry about a thing, we'll fix it all for you.") They also said I didn't need to cancel my card, but I did anyway, for peace of mind. Having done that, I have just spent half an hour of my life changing my passwords for Gmail, LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal, Land Registry and HMRC. Some of them I had changed, at some time maybe. Facebook informed me I hadn't changed my password since October 2005. I changed it. I changed them all.

Can I please entreat y'all to do the same. I now return you to regularly scheduled programming.

Comments

[via_ostiense]

What an awful situation! I'm glad PayPal and the bank are being helpful, and thank you for the heads up to change passwords.

[raven]

Oh, god, me too. No problem: I've become a temporary walking PSA on the subject. :)

[surexit]

Ugh, I'm so glad you got it sorted.

[raven]

Me too! Aaaaargh.

[soupytwist]

Oh, you poor thing. I'm sorry that's been an extra stress, but I'm glad it's being sorted. If it helps at all, I am assured by people who should know that for almost everyone, the only thing between them and being hacked is sheer blind luck that nobody happened to pick on their accounts to try it with. :(

(I should really have a greater number of passwords than I do, as some of my accounts do share them, but I am rubbish at remembering which goes with which!)

[raven]

Me too! I am thinking, though, writing them down and hiding them somewhere in my flat that no one but me and my partner can get into is probably safer than using the same one for everything...

[stained_glass]

Oh, thank God it is sorted! *HUGS*

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Fingers crossed PayPal play ball! I'm pretty sure they will, but am a bit on tenterhooks until I see the money come back in, y'know. But they were very very nice and helpful.

[stained_glass]

Oh, definitely! It is such a gut-wrenching feeling... *HUGS* Hope it all comes through very quickly!

[bookwormsarah.livejournal.com]

I've been using one of my passwords since 1997. It was my first ever internet password. I really should change it, shouldn't I? Bother. I have a (very silly) sentimental attachment to it - it was on the cover of a notebook given to me as a going-to-university present by my best friend who suddenly dropped out of contact with everyone two years later, and we've never been able to find out what happened to her. Maybe I'll keep it for something unimportant with no links to other things...

Thanks for the nudge.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Oh, no problem. I have that thing, too, with sentimental attachment to passwords! Glad to know I'm not the only one.

[littlered2.livejournal.com]

I'm glad people are being helpful and it's all being sorted out - how worrying for you. *hugs* (I am dreadful at changing my passwords, because I love routine; the thought of deviating from a set routine makes me edgy. That's not really a good enough reason for risking password fraud, admittedly.)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*squish* I figure, I got used to the first set over time and I will again. Doesn't mean it's not very disconcerting at the moment, though!

[dougs.livejournal.com]

[Almost] all my passwords are different from each other (the local "dougs" user account on the two laptops have the same password as each other), and only about a third of them are older than six months old. I think I know about fifty different passwords (since I also know administrator or domain-administrator accounts for about a dozen different clients).

I don't have difficulty maintaining fifty different passwords in my head and not writing any of them down... but I realise I'm a bit of an outlier.

[dougs.livejournal.com]

... but while I can remember fifty different passwords with ease, I'm absolutely and completely hopeless at remembering the names of people I meet all the time in real life.