Hello everyone,

The other day I was at a clients house and she told me an all too familiar story concerning her email account:

All of her contacts were receiving emails from her, but she had not sent these emails. The email message was pushing Viagra and as you can imagine, the client was very embarrassed. She asked me how this could happen and what to do about it. This is what I told her:

Somebody had gotten into her web based email account (Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) and was sending messages to all of her contacts. The messages looked like they were coming from her because the scammers were of course using her email address and her name.

In all likelihood the hackers guessed her password and/or guessed the answers to the secret questions that she gave when she initially set up her email account. The password was weak and the secret question answers were easy to figure out. Here is the fix to the problem:

1) Change the email password and make it strong (lower and upper case letters, numbers, symbols, 8 characters).

2) Change the answers to your secret questions (give false, phony answers that you will remember).

3) Make sure that the second email address (for confirmation) that is on record is actually yours and not the hackers.

4) In the email settings disable “email forwarding”.

Professor Randy says: Outsmart the unscrupulous hackers by using a strong password, by not clicking on suspicious email links, and by answering the secret questions with unknown information.