Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Blog, Internet resources, online reading groups, articles and interviews, Illuminatus! info.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Google outage

This blog apparently was down for awhile Wednesday. I thought I would explain what apparently happened.

Yesterday, while my phone was turned off and I was sitting in a meeting I was covering for my employer, a newspaper, my Gmail account apparently was hacked, and a phishing message was sent out hither and yon.

I did not find out about this until I came out of the meeting and turned my phone back on, and discovered that Google had disabled my account. This cut me off from all of my email, all of my reporter's notes (which I keep stored in Google Drive) and all of my other Google services.

To Google's credit, my service was quickly restored when I contacted them and explained the situation, but I have had to spend hours writing back to people to say, yes, I was hacked, repairing my Gmail account, getting various email apps to work again, etc. etc. Most of my contacts had disappeared, but fortunately Google has a method for restoring them.

I don't know what I did wrong, if I did anything wrong. I almost always use Linux or Macintosh computers, I thought I had a fairly strong password, I know enough not to click on obvious phishing scams. I've put in a new password and enabled two-step verification. It turns out that two-step verification is a big hassle -- it doesn't work with some email apps -- but I guess it's preferable to being hacked again.

Anyway, if you got a weird email message from me, sorry. And while my account was suspended by Google, my blog apparently was shut down. Now you know why.

Regular programming resumes tomorrow.

7 comments:

dylan said...

Thats a bummer, glad to see things are getting back to normal.

michael said...

I got an email from you, Tom. And when I opened it it read, "I have attached a documents (sic) to Google Drive. View online through (link)....It's very important."

Riiiiiight...

THEN it had links to your other blogs, but I wasn't buying. It was the STYLE. You always have a salutation with my first name in it.

fyreflye said...

I received nothing from you and there's nothing in my spam folder.

In ref Michael's post: the surest indication of a phish is bad grammer in the poster's message:)

BTW, I'd suggest everyone bookmark krebsonsecurity.com and make it a daily read.

fyreflye said...

Oh, and Tom, if he hasn't done it already, should change his password.

Cleveland Okie (Tom Jackson) said...

@fyreflye, I changed my password and turned on two-step verification.

fuzzbuddy said...

A comic strip on passwords: https://xkcd.com/936/

gacord said...

I got nothing. I would have noticed right away though because it likely wouldn't have been encrypted like normal and... LIKE EVERYONE SHOULD BE DOING FFS!

Bummer you got hacked, I hope it's all back sorted now.