My accounts are beign hacked, is there something I can do?

[Ev1lbl0w]

In the space of a month I had 5 accounts hacked: I've been receiving emails of blocked attemps and/or suspicious activity. Besides obviously changing the passwords, is there something else I can do? I was able to retrieve a strange working IP, can I like report it or something?

 

[JellyPerson]

What you want to do is to change every one of your accounts passwords. Make them all different ideally. Use a password generator like LastPass or smth

 

[Hayato213]

Why you have 5 accounts?

 

[Ev1lbl0w]

@Hayato213 I have way more than that: google, microsoft, steam, spotify, discord, gbatemp... Maybe you understood that I had 5 accounts here on gbatemp..?
@JellyPerson LastPass seems nice, I'll give it a try. But is there something else I can do?

 

[Hayato213]

Oh I see, I thought you had like 5 Gbatemp account. You should use two way authorization for important account like bank account and main email account you use.

 

[Mr. Wizard]

2 step auth

 

[FAST6191]

For something to be happening over that period rather than all at once is slightly odd (I would usually expect things to happen in a very short space of time). Check your machine, phone/tablet and whatever for malware or think what machines you have put passwords into -- it need not be that account either as [email protected] and a password you use for everything is OK for trying on other services.

After that it depends.
Make a list of all the accounts you have, and further all those you really care about.

I hope you don't reuse passwords for anything you care about. Password changing will be in your future though. Change passwords for everything on your freshly cleaned machine.

If you want to make a new email address and assign it all to them then I will applaud that.

If you want to use two factor (you type a password, it sends a text message to a phone or something) then there are worse things you can do. If you want to get really paranoid then go buy a cheap disposable/prepaid/pay as you go sim card and put it in a phone used just for that.

 

[Ev1lbl0w]

@Mr. Wizard @FAST6191 I didn't use 2FA very much but now that you mention it I should really start using it, at least for my important stuff. Thanks for the tip.
What I do want to know more about is if there's something else I can do. Right now I feel powerless while someone is just logging in to my stuff and getting away with it. MEGA.nz "caught" the IP and I was wondering if, by having that info, I can do something further, like report it to authorities or something like that.

 

[AmandaRose]

I got an email a few days ago saying someone in Poland was trying to access my gbatemp.net account lol.

 

[Skittyusedcovet]

If you can setup an account with 2FA do it. I had to have an account deleted from somewhere else because some idiot kept trying to get into it. I couldnt set up 2FA on it and everytime the person tried to access it kept trying until it ran out of attempts and the website emailed me to change my password. I would just go to the website directly and change my password. Mind you this a monthly occurrence and i was so sick and tired of it. There was nothing i could do. lol

 

[gamesquest1]

I will echo what @FAST6191, it might be worth making a new email and/or ensuring all your security questions etc are changed to prevent someone just resetting your password again and getting access to all your accounts again

also just double check that someone hasn't added any recovery emails to your account

 

[ZachSZ]

Use a password manager like Lastpass and go through and change every password to a long generated password.

 

[SomeGamer]

KeePass + offline OTP generator, maybe a YubiKey could help too if you're extra paranoid.

 

[Ryab]

See the way I manage my passwords is I have a long list of of accounts and its password written down on a paper and all my passwords are 15 randomly generated characters in the past 3 years had 1 account hacked

 

[Pleng]

@Zyvyn and what happens if that paper gets damaged, lost or stolen? And what if you don't have it on you when you need to log in to a site?

 

[Exannor]

Last account I had that almost got hacked was my own steam account

Glad I had steam guard in place and I checked the activity on my email and there was nothing so I’m golden.

I did also change my email password