If you use birthdays, initials or simple passwords for your email account, your email account WILL be hacked, it’s not a matter of ‘IF” but a matter of ‘WHEN’!

We even had a corporate client have the email password protocol using the email address with 123 appended, so admin123 for the email account admin@.

I know right?

We warned them, and within 10 months we got a call from a very upset and distressed business owner.

Not only had their email account been hacked, thousands of emails had been sent to ALL the contacts connected with that email account, so looking like real emails from admin@businessname but promoting some sex health product.

A lot of very upset contacts.

It gets worse, all those contacts were then added to a SPAM Bot so they got all sorts of other SPAM emails.

It gets even worse!

Because many people reported these emails as SPAM, the IP Address of the website was blacklisted. So then they couldn’t even send out legitimate emails.

That stopped the business in its tracks.

But wait, it then actually got even worse!

Google then deemed the website a threat and gave it the ‘red screen of death’
(go on, Google ‘google red screen of death’ and look at the images, scary).

The damage that was done to their brand and reputation in the short term was horrific, but the ongoing cost was phenomenal. It cost them in client and prospect trust, in email marketing reach, on social, and could have all been avoided so easily.

We managed to get the emails sorted, the website secure, and the IP Address blacklisting lifted, and the red screen of death with Google removed, but at great expense, and business downtime.

I can assure you I don’t use pbb050460 as my password for anything, not hard to Google my initials or find out my birth date.

Use complex cryptic passwords, they should contain letters, numbers and digits with 10 plus characters. I go for 17 characters.

EG: hctJ2sBrhu&kGNE$V

My website password? 40 characters, true story.

Oh, and by the way, never try and type your password, copy/paste means no typo’s and is faster 🙂

There are online password generators or let your webbie or IT dude handle it.

Smart Actions:

1) Is your email password simple?

2) If yes, contact your webbie of IT dude and UPDATE it, NOW!

We hope this helps you avoid damaging your brand or online reputation and gives you a better understanding of what can happen online. This is just one of the many horror stories we have.

If you want a website security audit you can make that happen here  ?

https://www.smarterwebsites.com.au/yes/100-days-web-report/

PS: How is this related to ‘world domination’?

Productivity, branding protection, just downtime for no reason is why!