I've Been Bamboozled!

I cannot help but to feel utterly, just senselessly utterly vulnerable.

I have been robbed -- violated -- and I am just feeling like a hapless fool. I don't even know how it happened.

I was going about my business today like any other day. You may recall that I had three exams lined up back to back and quite a bit of homework from my stat class due. I had gotten up at 3 AM to study and do homework, and when I came back from class about noon-ish, I was just ready to take a breather.

I went about checking my e-mails as I do always. And there it was. Staring me in the face.

haemicuda@yahoo.com Haemi has accepted your invitation to Gmail and has chosen the brand new address blowntohell@gmail.com. haemicuda@yahoo.com's new address has been automatically added to your contact list so you can stay in touch with Gmail.

Just for clarification -- haemicuda@yahoo.com is my own e-mail at yahoo. This message was sent to my Gmail account, which is NOT blowntohell@gmail.com.

I thought it might be one of those hoax e-mails like the ebay spoof e-mails from scammers that I get occassionally. But it just couldn't be! Just until last night, I had six invites to Gmail to give away -- now it said that I have five.

First of all, I had never sent an invite out. Secondly, even if I had sent out an invite, it would not have been to myself at my yahoo address.

From the evidence that I had, I had to deduce two things -- someone has gotten access to my Gmail account; someone has also gotten access to my Yahoo account. Now these are the two e-mail addresses I use most frequently. These are the e-mail addresses I rely heavily on. (Let's ignore that whole "not ending a sentence with a preposition" business for now. It's an emergency!) All this time, my passwords for everything an anything has been a rather lengthy string of numbers. And it is the same password for everything I have! Never, would I have thought that this passcode would be penetratable.

I am worried up the wazoo -- I have saved so much information in both of these e-mail inboxes -- the login information for various financial accounts, saved e-mails from friends and family, correspondence with colleges I have applied/will apply to. Just thought of some stranger hacking into my personal information is just creepy. Of course I have changed all the passwords, and made them all different, and I'll probably forget all of them by tonight, but somehow, I don't think that would help.

I feel like my home had been robbed. I suppose it is my fault for never changing passwords and making all my passwords the same (although I don't know for sure if the passwords are what made me open to such violations). I'll have to do what I can to update my passwords and whatnot. I don't know what this stranger had done with my accounts yet, other than to create a gmail account. If he wanted one, he could've just asked. Gosh.

Everybody who's reading this: change your passwords regularly and make sure they aren't simple things that are easy to guess. Also, if you should get a rather dubious e-mail from any of my e-mail addresses, please ignore, or better yet, forward them to me.

I'm going to go cross my fingers and rock back and forth in the fetal position and wish that this was all a dream. Good night.