Worked with an American ex-pat professor that’s working and living here in Jinja last week. He was terrified about the fact that his hotmail account had been hacked and all these messages were being generated from his email account. I checked the time stamps on the sent emails and saw that they were sent very early in the morning when his machine was turned off and his Internet was disconnected. I ran a few scans on his laptop and everything came back clean. This pointed to the fact that it wasn’t his machine but rather his email account that was compromised. A bit more researched revealed that his email account’s “secret answer” was basically set to his password (one character difference). I spent about an hour getting his account back in shape, changing his passwords and secret questions and teaching him a bit about how hackers use this stuff to compromise his account. He was ecstatic to have regained control of his account.
