In part what I had posted was that I found it ironic that somebody who had clearly been a victim of poor security practices would lament their existence.
Specifically:
Just now I got the same hassle with a Google account. After a big fuss, it asked me to change my password without any evidence that the password was compromised.
From
here:
If there’s suspicious activity in your Google Account or we detect that your password has been stolen, we may ask you to change your password. By changing your password, you help make sure that only you can use your account.
As per the
thread I referenced. I don't think he ever took the gravity of the compromise of his system seriously. The system was infected with 25 or more pieces of malware which would have most certainly provided access to his account passwords. Running Malwarebytes and assuming the problem was fixed has clearly not worked- Google is asking him to change his password because it has detected malicious activity already, unusual sign-in behaviour (eg. wildly different locations) or detected the password was otherwise compromised.
Assuming, of course, this happens during sign-in. Google won't send E-mails telling people to change their password- That is phishing and is probably somebody trying to get your current password.
Complaining about more or less the "inconvenience of it all" as he is doing here seems to underline to me that he simply isn't taking the problem seriously.
Geek-9pm, My recommendation would be to
immediately change all your passwords. I bold immediately because I do not mean to merely add it to your to-do list. It should be a top priority. Change all said passwords and make them unique from each other, too. (If necessary you can always resort to writing the passwords down, that is still better than sharing passwords between services)
Malware compromise means you cannot trust any passwords you changed while the system was infected. Personally I wouldn't trust the computer at all without a clean install, but that is just me. In addition to that sort of compromise, forums and various services often get compromised on their own Sometimes it is announced, sometimes it isn't, but. If you use the same password on various sites and one of them gets compromised then it becomes that much easier to access your accounts elsewhere using the same password.
Furthermore, that information is now often used for attempted extortion. A few weeks ago I got a "scary" E-mail from somebody claiming to be a "hacker" who claimed to know my password and have access to my computer and all my contacts. The password they mentioned was something I used decades ago- I changed it everywhere that mattered entirely because it became part of released "black market" compromised data.
One can see how people who don't take security seriously and who complain about the inconvenience of Google asking them to change their password when their account has been compromised could easily fall victim to those E-mails because the Password being accurate due to never being changed offers legitimacy to the rest of their claims. (Which are the standard nonsense, transfer BTC etc etc blah blah the consequences will be dire etc.)
Heh, BC_Programmer, you remember what C++ was first called?
C with classes, if I've understood the question. Bit of a non-sequiter, though!
