Hacked!

Whew! The last two days have been stressful. On Tuesday my eBay and gmail accounts were hacked and stolen. I was able to get my Ebay account restored almost immediately (Ebay has a great system for this sort of thing -- the fact that the thief was buying thousands of dollars of computers when I've never had a transaction over a hundred bucks in five years probably helped). I never thought I'd get my email account back, but Google did an investigation and returned my account to me this morning. I was in despair over this identity theft, but now I'm just reassured that everything is getting back to normal.

Lessons I've learned: Run spyware and virus protection on the computer weekly (if not more often). Keep our firewall up to date. And most importantly, don't use the same passwords for everything. I don't know how I'm going to remember all my new passwords for everything, but being hard to remember also means being hard to guess, so I'll figure it out.