safe?

[indigo_rose99]

I read the post about keeping one's journal safe.  I do not now and have never had a hotmail account.  And yet I discovered today that someone has broken into my LJ account and... changed one of my userpics to something offensive.  Random spam or personal attack?  I have no idea.

Comments

[reedrover]

Yeah, I recently changed my LJ password just 'cause...

Grrr.

[tiger-stripes.livejournal.com]

Do you use any of the public email services like yahoo, google, etc?

If you do, that leaves you open. My domains are hosted by a secure company because of this type of nonsense. I have a gmail account, but I only use that for mailing lists and not particularly anything important.

[indigo-rose99.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I do use one of those public email services. Are you aware of anything (beyond paying for email) that I can do to prevent it?

[tiger-stripes.livejournal.com]

Use Hushmail :) I'm most likely going to move my gmail stuff to it. The problem doesn't have anything to do with you per se, but the idiots who use the system and in a lot of cases, the idiots who design the system.

http://www.hushmail.com/

Port 80 and 443 are one big hole, and people write insecure applications in Javascript, PHP, etc. all the time. Those get exploited, and that's the biggest problem.

[thereisnomagic.livejournal.com]

Hushmail only lets you purchase 250 MB of storage at the moment (the limit on individual attachments seems to be 25 MB). I find it unusual that you cannot purchase more storage from them.

This 250 MB limit is not a problem if you move the mail from them to a local system (e.g. your computers). Tastes differ.