I was sending and reading email from my gmail account the other day when I noticed a very strange thing. The email I was sending looked a little different than normal. I checked some settings and then I noticed that the name on my emails that I was sending, was wrong. The name that was showing up in my email was Horst Gunter. Who in the world is Horst Gunter and how did he get into my email account?!? That is when a cold sweat fell over me as I thought about someone getting into my email account and messing around. My gmail account is tied to about 20 other accounts around the web. I quickly clicked my way over to my settings page and found the “Change Password as quickly as possible” button in Google. I changed the password to a very complex set of letters, numbers, characters and umlauts. I included Capital Letters, small letters, commas, squiggly’s, numbers and infinite values. To make positively sure that this hijacker did not get into my account again, I think I even put in a couple of values of Pi and integrated integers.
After my frantic clicking, punching of buttons and keystrokes, I finally felt secure again. It sure did scare me to see something changed like that in a very critical area of my life.
After getting home that night, I took one extra precaution and renamed my dog. His new name is #m%gZ~2.
Am I paranoid?
