People getting Paypal accounts hacked

[moonrambler]

Several people I know from another forum have gotten their Paypal accounts hacked within the past couple of weeks. There doesn't seem to be anything obvious about how it could have happened. I was wondering if any of you know any particular ways to prevent it from occurring. Some of these people say they never use their account to pay for anything and they have highly secure passwords. Some have wound up getting money taken from their checking accounts that they had linked to PP. I've deleted my checking account from my PP account and left up an old one that I cancelled several years ago. I don't have any debit or credit cards registered on the site except the PP card.

[ssandra]

No idea.

I did get an email a couple of weeks ago from "paypal" which of course wasn't form paypal.

Any chance those people answered or opened or did something with those emails?

(love your status btw very suited for you!!)

I hope someone can tell us more.... For now, I'll keep an eye out, and change my password a bit more often....

[moonrambler]

I used to get those e-mails all the time when I was selling on eBay regularly. I get the sense most of these people are too savvy to have gotten in trouble that way. One person's bank told her that this is becoming common with Paypal. That certainly isn't very reassuring!

About the only extra thing I could think of doing is change my security questions to more secure ones. Some security questions are so dumb. Like my bank has an option, "What was the first musical instrument you learned to play?"

[ssandra]

Originally Posted by moonrambler

I used to get those e-mails all the time when I was selling on eBay regularly. I get the sense most of these people are too savvy to have gotten in trouble that way. One person's bank told her that this is becoming common with Paypal. That certainly isn't very reassuring!

About the only extra thing I could think of doing is change my security questions to more secure ones. Some security questions are so dumb. Like my bank has an option, "What was the first musical instrument you learned to play?"

One tip I read somewhere is to always answer your security questions with something else. Meaning if the question is "what street did you grow up" you put your favorite sports team as the answer... or a sequence of numbers that only you know.

[Sansone]

One common way is when people use the same password for everything.

An example of this being a problem would be somebody hacking a less secure site. Forums are excellent examples where a hacker might be able to learn of a vulnerability in a certain version of software and get a bunch of members info.

That's basically email addresses and passwords.

Another way is what they call phishing. That's where you get somebody to visit a site that looks just like another site (myspace, facebook, paypal) and trick them into entering their info there. They will usually use a site that seems important and uses your email address as part of the login.

Somebody with such a list can then just try the known passwords, and a certain amount of them will work, no matter how obscure, since some users don't want to remember or store a bunch of passwords.

Some will also have the same password for their actual webmail account. Now the thief can browse emails and find all kinds of memberships, either with passwords or with the ability to reset passwords and access the email where they are sent.

Bad scene.

First rule of the internet with my kids is to never ever use your email password for anything else.

Second rule is never ever type your password into a page where you clicked on a link to get there.

Anybody sends what looks like an important email... paypal, the bank, whatever... type in the URL you usually use and log in the usual way. If it's that important and it's real, there should be an easy way to access it from your normal login method.

[moonrambler]

Originally Posted by ssandra

One tip I read somewhere is to always answer your security questions with something else. Meaning if the question is "what street did you grow up" you put your favorite sports team as the answer... or a sequence of numbers that only you know.

Yeah, I had been thinking that a person could put an unrelated answer for that 'musical instrument' question. But I bet nearly everyone just types in 'piano' or whatever.

[moonrambler]

@ Sansone -- That all makes sense. I had considered when my Gmail account got hacked it may have been related to my using that password for other websites. I hadn't thought much about it at the time because the Gmail account was just a back-up that I rarely used, but I still had several personal e-mail addresses in there that got spammed.