Well it looks like attention that the local blogger conference acquired has not been all good. Just read on Mr. Brown’s blog that one of our most in(famous) bloggers, Xiuxia just had her Blogger blog hacked into, erased and defaced. On top of that, since Blogger is owned by Google, the Hacker also managed to get her Gmail password and thus deleted all her cumulated mail, something in the number of 3000 odd mails since Gmail offers such a large amount of email space (over 2Gigs worth).
Like her or not, this is still a criminal act against a persons privacy and is in fact bigger than just some little girl in little Singapore losing some stuff. Since Google is not a local company, international cybercrime laws could come into affect if the Hacker was ever caught. And if Google pushes charges because of the damage done to their integrity, then that guy will be in for a whole load of crap.
That being said, the price of fame is the unwanted attention. Nothing anyone does is going to be able to please everyone else, so as one gathers more attention, it is wise to be prepared.
A first step would be to have updated backups of whatever you keep online, offline…like in your own computer. As an added precaution, online storage services away from your normal blog sites can be used as well, just in case your harddisk fails or as such. For Gmail, using the POP3 feature would allow you to download whatever mail you have received and sent into POP3 email program such as Thunderbird.
Of course that is just for if you do happen to get hacked. As always, prevention is better than cure in which case the major topic would be Passwords. A good rule of thumb is not to use any words found in a dictionary in part or full. Just because the word is “password“, doesn’t mean it has to be an actual word. Using a password generator is usually the bast way to get a random password. Make sure you include numbers and different letter case into the generator for best results. Adding punctuation just makes it really hard to remember and usually ends up giving more trouble than it’s worth.
Of course passwords are only the start of keeping yourself and your privacy safe online. I have mentioned this before but I have found an article that gives recommendations to how to improve security. Since it’s kind off over-the-top (even though almost everything is true), just using some of the recommendations would go a long way to keeping you safe.
