Over the last few weeks, we’ve had a number of our members who have had their email accounts hacked.  We believe this occurs when the password on the account is not very robust, and a hacking program is able to crack it.  This has happened to accounts that are web based (you sign on to a web site to view your email, such as Yahoo, AOL, gmail).  If the GCCMail address is in your address book, the list gets SPAMed.

You can prevent this from happening to you (or make it less likely) by changing your email account password to something that cannot be easily cracked; there are so many easy ones out there that the hackers probably won’t bother with something that’s hard to crack.  Include both upper and lower case letters, a number, and even a special character if permitted by your system.  Something as simple as mE$49 is unlikely to be broken, as compared to the rather common 12345.

Roger Pierce

List Manager

GCCMail at gccfla.org