My account has been hacked! Help!!!

I can only think of two things you could do off hand. One is to contact support at upload.com and report what happened. Maybe they can get your account back for you.

The other is to start over, change your links, and use a better password.

why are people so heartless? I hope you can prove your case and if possible get the name of the person.

Its a real shame

Thanks, guys. This is a major part of my listbuilding strategies and it took so much time, so it really sucks!

Important Lesson: Use the strongest possible password on EVERY account you have.

Michael,

I had my primary income site hacked a couple years ago. It cost me dearly so I can empathize with you. Here are a few tips about setting passwords:

Make your password as difficult as possible for software or humans to guess. Some hackers use software to blast user name and password combinations at a web site. This is known as a "brute force" attack. The longer your password is, the harder it will be to crack.

Find out how many characters can be in your password and what characters are allowed, then use a password that uses as many characters as allowed and also uses a healthy mix of upper and lower case letters, plus numbers and special characters if they're allowed. Each additional character makes the password exponentially harder to crack, so making it as long as possible is crucial!

EXAMPLE: Using only the lower case alphabet, there are 456,976 combinations of letters possible in a four-letter password. A five-letter password has 11,881,376 combinations. You can see how a 12-letter password that uses lower case, upper case, numbers and special characters would be infinitely harder to crack. My calculator doesn't go that high.

DO NOT replace characters with similar looking special characters, such as changing "password" to "p@$$w0rd". The better hacking tools have a "leet" feature, as it's called, which substitutes special characters for similar looking letters when it's trying dictionary words and proper names. In fact, your password should not spell any word at all. That will render dictionary attacks ineffective.

Make sure your passwords for all administration (FTP, control panel, software admin, and email accounts) are complex and difficult to guess. Use a different password for each application. If a hacker cracks one, he or she won't have access to everything else.

Don't choose a user name like "admin" or "administrator." If you use something that simple, a hacker is already halfway in. I've even seen people use "password" for their password. Sure, it's easy to remember, but the easier it is to remember, the easier it is to guess.

By using a strong user name and strong password, the odds of your site or your accounts getting hacked are greatly reduced.

I agree with Dennis, just contact the support and see what they can do for you.

Sometimes it is not the problem with how you set the password. If the hacker plants a virus to sniff your password, no matter how strange your password is, he can read it loud and clear. Encrypting our Internet connection is another level of protection. But then again, we have to find out the root cause of your problem first in order to solve this. And prevention is always better than cure.

I've never been hacked, but I use sites like this to come up with passwords and then save them on my hard drive.

Online Password Generator by Stefan Frei

Sure, I still have a weak link in there (my system), but I don't think most guys are looking for my passwords with adware.

Good luck, and hope everything works out for you.

-Lance

Having just been hacked on my host I agree that password strength and username variance are critical.

I believed the issue was with my host and they believed the issue was with my system having a virus. I argued I'm clean as I virus check constantly. Low and behold I scanned my system with a different security system and found viruses my expensive paid service had not picked up even though it updates constantly. So adware is not the issue, it's trojans, viruses and keyloggers that we need to protect ourselves from as well.

Good luck with getting your access back.

On the hosting side, another thing that is often overlooked is anonymous FTP. I think every host I've ever used have anonymous FTP enabled by default. Unless you want to allow the uploading of files to your site, disable this "feature" as it's just another backdoor into your site.

Mello - what second security system did you use???