Recently I was a victim of having various online accounts hacked into and purchases were made across a number of saved accounts on different shopping websites including deliveroo, ASOS and so on. As a result, I had to cancel a number of my credit cards where purchases were attempted. While I was very fortunate that my credit card had a good security system where I was alerted to every purchase being charged, hence I managed to stop every transaction, it meant that my credit card details are now vulnerable. I was also quite lucky that the person did not managed to get access to my email accounts.
The biggest problem was that I used the same passwords across a number of websites, which meant that anyone who had that one password and email address could access every single one of them. I knew there was a danger of using the same password, but I thought it couldn’t happen to me and it was much easier to remember. But no. I spent the whole day logging into all the accounts to change password and answering to alerts from websites that I had unusual activity on the accounts, but I am thankful to those websites that actually had sufficient cyber security to detect and lock the accounts immediately.
So now that this has happened to me, I would just like to put out a friendly reminder to everyone to not use the same password for every website. Most importantly, do not use the same password on anything else that you use for your email address because that’s the last line of defense. If you have your credit card details saved on websites, please make sure that your credit card has sufficient safety backstops such as requiring an OTP; otherwise, remove them from the websites after your purchases. Never ever tell anyone the OTP code that you have received and check that the payment page is secure and authentic.
Hope this friendly note will help save some of you from the same thing that I went through! On a side note, maybe I am too naive but I don’t understand why anyone would do such a thing. How many people do they have to go through and how much work do they have to put in before they could steal a substantial amount of money? Why not use all that energy on something constructive instead? I’m upset but I feel sorry for them. Peace out.
The Good Life Bunny 
A couple of weeks ago, my eBay account actually got hacked. I don’t use eBay very often, however I like to browse on there and sometimes put things into my basket even though most of the time, I don’t outright buy them immediately. One day, I noticed I was logged out of my ebay account which I didn’t think was unusual because this happens for me on Twitter and other websites. For some reason, I couldn’t login and even with the whole “forgot your password?” and security system such as answering security questions, I couldn’t do anything. I checked my email and turns out a few days before all that, someone managed to hack into my account and change my email address entirely! The email was a confirmation that the email address had been changed recently. Luckily, when I called eBay and retrieved the account, no transactions or activity was made. They just changed my name, phone number, email and even username which was very strange. (and also scary because it means that person likely knows my address too.)
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