What a timely reminder to steer the topic back to security. It embarasses me to admit it, but in all likelihood, my Windows Live Messenger account was hacked. The damage, my contact list was spammed with some acai berry diet pill offer. The spam wasn’t particularly convincing, as anyone who knows me wouldn’t consider me losing 21 pounds being a good thing. In fact, I’m on a weight gain diet but that’s a whole other story. Nonetheless, it got me to review my security practices. There is definitely rooom for improvement. No, that is spelt correctly.

To those affected, my sincerest apology. I’m in no way implying that you need to lose weight. While I hope the messenger spam is the only chaos caused, there is always the possibility that they could have made away with the email addresses of my contacts. I personally could think of better things to do with those information than to send spam but evidently there are people that would fall for them.

Within minutes of the spam being sent, a mate of mine txt’d me to let me know what had happened. Now, I’ve come across this before. In all the previous cases, I was the one being spammed. Unfortunately, this time, the table is turned. From past experiences, changing the Windows Live Messenger password seems to help; and that is just what I did. So far, things are looking alright. Fingers crossed. While it may seem an obvious response, I’m not entirely convinced that it is always the smartest thing to do.

As the saying goes, ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me‘. I’m now extremely motivated to get to the bottom of this. I have done a bit of research into this already but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of information on it. I’m going to start a new page on my blog to present my findings. I’ve learn some interesting things already. I do need to run some tests to confirm my theories.

On the positive side, it resurrected some of my old contacts. People I haven’t talked to in ages suddenly started contacting me. It also prompted me to trim off any dead contacts. This way, should it somehow happen again, the damage will be minimised.