The organisers of the Save the Green Dragon campaign have reported that their email account has been attacked by hackers and are asking supporters to resend messages. It is unclear whether this is an example of the "normal" type of Internet crime or a deliberate attempt to sabotage the campaign.
During June hackers broke into the email account and diverted messages sent to the campaign to another email address that the hackers control. As a consequence, the Campaign did not receive messages sent to it between 22nd June and 6th July.
The Campaign's email address is , but the hackers diverted messages to the similar looking but fraudulent address . As well as preventing messages getting through to the campaign organisers, the hackers will have been able to read the messages and collect information about supporters of the campaign.
Mike and Sharon McClean are asking people to resend messages to and to copy address them to . They would also like to know if anyone received messages from the fraudulent account.
Hacking of email accounts is a common occurrence. The perpetrators are usually seeking to obtain information that will allow them to access online bank accounts or other potential sources of money. However, it is not out of the question that this attack was designed to collect intelligence about the campaign and its supporters or simply to disrupt it by preventing messages getting through.
How to prevent hacking
Your email account and other online services that you use are vulnerable if you do not use a "strong" password or if you use the same password for more than one account. A strong password should consist of a meaningless sequence of upper and lower-case letters and numbers. Using a different unmemorable password for each account is obviously very inconvenient, but this problem can be solved by using password saving features built into many web browsers (on both desktop computers and mobile devices) or by using a service such as Roboform, which allows you to securely synchronise passwords and other sensitive information across all the computers and other devices that you own.
Using wi-fi hotspots (eg in cafes and pubs) also makes your laptop, smartphone or tablet vulnerable to hacking. A hacker sitting at another table and using their computer or phone to set up a spoof wi-fi hotspot might be able to discover a surprising amount of information about you in a very short time - not just your bank account details, but also all sorts of personal information about you and your contacts (there are hundreds of articles about the risk on the Internet, for instance this one). At the very least you should ensure that you never access online banking using a hotspot, but preferably you should use a service such as HotspotShield.