Last night I received an email from Google telling me that someone in Moscow, Russia had signed into my gmail account.
“Holy shit,” I said to my wife, and, in a bit of a panic and without thinking, I clicked on the blue “Not me !” button. And then I immediately logged into Google and changed my gmail password. Phew! Thank you, Google, for protecting my gmail account from hackers.
This morning I went back and looked more closely at the email from Google. I noticed that the alleged location of the sign-in was “Moscow Russian.” Not Russia, but Russian! Suddenly the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
So I went to my Sent Mail folder to see who my “Not me” response was sent to.
I have a sneaking suspicion that my “Not me” response recipients — chsup3, doopmail, eddie_evans_pb, geekjohnnie, and ishancock — are not part of the security team at Google.
Dammit. I’m apparently the victim of email spoofing (the creation of email messages with a forged sender address) and/or phishing (a fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information or data). Now I’m going to have to spend all day changing all of my passwords and monitoring all of my online accounts for any signs of fraudulent activity.
Fuck you, 2020!
This, That, and the Other 
Firstly, clever post title 🙂 Secondly, holy crap!! Good thing you noticed that. I’m sure 98% of people wouldn’t. I thank you for sharing because this post will likely save a ton of people from this scam!!!
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I certainly learned something: think before you click!
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I get a lot of spam like this and I always delete it.
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That’s what I should have done. 🤦🏼♂️
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What information did it send to these people? Was it sensitive?
I just think that if clicking the link resulted in an email, it was unlikely to have contacted them using any other means. I’d have thought anything which trawled for passwords would need some kind of “privileged” access. If in doubt, ask Apple.
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I don’t know what info it sent them, but I’m getting some weird emails since last night.
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When you hit that button, I’m guessing that the only thing it did was to add your address to an email list someplace. It sounds like all you did was to confirm that your address existed.
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I hope that’s all I did.
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Yes, you are wise to change all your passwords again after realising your mistake with this. I hope you sorted all this before they had time to do anything.
My goodness, it will certainly make me wary of emails more than I do already. But I never click on the email when I have had some like that in the past, whether Gmail or anywhere else for that matter, but used my own saved link and gone there myself.
They want screwing that do these kind of things to people.
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Fortunately I think I caught it in time before any real damage was done. But it was a hassle.
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That’s good you caught it in time. Yes, definitely a load of hassle.
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That is shit…. but lucky you went back to check 😊
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At least you went back and checked, instead of learning the hard way!
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True. I shouldn’t have clicked before investigating, but I think I minimized the damage.
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Reblogged this on CRAIN'S COMMENTS and commented:
This is a crucial lesson in online security. Always check the url of the source of a message before you do anything with it!
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Could you report those emails to the real Google? Two of them are even gmail accounts.
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I did report them to Google. Hopefully they will take some action.
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Have you got lots of different email accounts, with different mail providers? It saves a lot of work when this happens. Spread the risk.
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Just two. My personal gmail email account and an outlook email account for this blog.
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It worth considering a few more, like keeping separate one just for online banking, one for bills and utilities, another for online shopping, one for reliable online subscriptions and another for less reliable websites, and so on.
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Something to consider. Thanks.
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Ugh! How annoying 😡
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I know!
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Holy cow!
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I get these emails regularly but on my Hotmail address. The first time I panicked too but now I just delete them and report them for phishing. My Gmail account hasn’t had such issues till date.
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In hindsight, I should have deleted it.
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Yes, hindsight is 20/20!
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Thanks for the heads up. It is always good to know about the schemes floating around. I hope you have good fortune in closing down any illicit use.
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It took a while to change all those passwords, but I don’t think any real damage was done.
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You can run but you cannot hide.
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Yeah, I know. 😡
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Annoying for sure. I just don’t understand the minds of people who cause such trouble.
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I don’t get it, either.
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I guess my situation turned out to be good, probably, but I got a new phone and everything transferred over except one note that I had in my secure folder that had a bunch of stuff but also my passwords. I have been resetting them one by one as I need to.
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You just taught me something useful if you get a mail saying someone signed in your account first see if the location is proper it should be Russia not Russian similarly it should be America not American Thanku I am 13 yrs old hacker and post blogs related to learn hacking
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You’re a hacker? Shame on you. Why do you want to make others miserable?
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I am a ethical hacker not like those bad hackers and 2nd thing is I don’t a shit abouting hacking I am learning
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“An ethical hacker” sounds like an oxymoron, like “an honest thief.”
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I am not a theiffff I think defence is more important then attacking. So I am a gopd hacker, white hat hacker..
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Well, I hope so.
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😏
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It seems every week I get a new phishing scam email. They are endless.
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