Yesterday we had our info@womenwithaltitude email account hacked.

I would love to blame the full moon, and maybe that had something to do with the A**hole who decided to hack gmail yesterday, but I have to face the harsh reality. We hear of cyber attacking, phishing scams all the time right? but now that its happened to me it’s no longer that ‘3rd party removed’ feeling. So firstly:

If you received an email from info@beta.womenwithaltitude.com.au yesterday that said ‘view doc’ it was a scam email. Don’t open it and just delete it. If you did open it and tried to log into your gmail, then google advises you change your password. Big thanks to Louise Tomkins for jumping in and helping me, you’re the best!

What a bloody inconvenience….. I feel a desire to apologise and then I have to remind myself, Im not the hacker grrrrr.

Surprisingly there are also some lesson’s I learnt. So now I want to share them with you, in the hope that it might help you avoid such things in the future.
In no particular order:

• Change your password more regularly. I thought I had a good password but change it up every few months. yeah yeah I hear you say….. please do. if I had done that maybe I wouldn’t have been hacked.

• I learnt that there such great people in our community that all rang and messaged me yesterday to advise me that this has happened. Thank you 🙂

• Trust your gut. If your filter doesn’t give you a warning that its a spam email, and you think that doesn’t sound like Andrea or WWA and its showing all these emails addresses ( something we would NEVER do) and its not conversational like WWA usually is then it probably isn’t from us.

• Thanks to the one person on FB who had to say how unprofessional it was to send out an email like that, rather than checking. Ive learnt there is ALWAYS one person swift to knock.

• Don’t think, like I did that hosting your email on google in the cloud will make you immune because google is such a big company and they have great firewalls in place blah blah – its bullshit, it happens to anyone, anytime.

• Use numbers and ^&*()@#%^& symbols in your passwords – Trish gave us this advise ages ago, its true.

• You can call and talk to Google! do you want to know how? after hours of trying to find out how to talk to someone yesterday – I finally discovered how and I figure  there are other intelligent, savvy people who feel like they are going mad when they need to do something simple like phone for support and cant find it. So heres how:

You’re welcome

Love Andy xxx