Attention all users!

[Azhtek]

As of late, a lot of users across a variety of sites have had various accounts hacked, such as Yahoo, Livemail, their email, and so on. While this is not a rare occurrence (Happens more than you'd think), it does seem to be becoming a more prevalent trend as of late. Again, this is not rare, these events come in waves, and we just so happen to be experiencing one of those.

In the interests of protecting the users of the site, I recommend the following.

1. Change your account passwords. Use something that can't be guessed in a dictionary attack, such as $cl0e46%. It doesn't have to be that garbled, but throwing in symbols makes it harder for people and programs to guess. Make it non-standard.

2. If any other accounts shared your previous password, change them to something different. This has to be one of the most common mistakes people make in security. For the sake of convenience, and it is a nice convenience, they make their passwords universal. So if one account becomes compromised, it means that all accounts of theirs are compromised.

3. Run malware and spyware scans on your system. Most of you would be familiar with a virus scan. However, what is not known is that many anti-virus scanners miss a lot of stuff, either from poor virus definitions or because they aren't looking in the right places. Two free programs I recommend for this task are MalwareBytes and SuperAntiSpyware. Both have free editions. Download them, install them, update them, run full scans and let them go. Once you're done, remove the infections it finds, reboot your computer. If you find anything particularly bad (IE rogue software, trojans, etc) I'd recommend running the scans again after putting your computer in safe mode. Google how. This sort of thing should be taught in schools by now, in my opinion, since a great many people didn't even know what anti-virus was, and thought Windows Firewall was enough to keep things out. After you're done, feel free to uninstall them if you no longer want to keep these programs around. They have no real time protection systems like an anti-virus would.

4. Ensure that your anti-virus is up to date. Make sure that you have the latest version of the software. A lot of the time, a company will provide less support to an older version of the software, prompting users to update. (If you have a subscription, upgrading to the newest software is usually free. I suggest having your licence key handy just in case you have to re-enter it.) If you don't have any anti-virus, there are free alternatives, such as AVG Free (I highly recommend this) or Avast! Anti-Virus.

5. Tell other people to review their security. This one is a little harder to do, since it's up to them to actually do it, but if you relay to them that many other people from various sites have been experiencing compromised accounts, then maybe they'll listen. Maybe. It's their responsibility to ensure their own security, however.

And that's it. Please try to remember that online security is rather serious. Identity theft is easiest when you don't have to put a face or a voice to the person you're talking to.