Fraud

I have just experienced the worst customer service imaginable. Last year I set up my own domain with SiteGround and thought it was weird that they sent me my password to my account in clear text via email. Anyway, since this password was not used for anything else, I didn't really think much of it.

Very silly of me because two weeks ago someone in South Africa managed to hack my site and send out phishing emails to hundreds of people in South Africa claiming to be Standard Bank. I was notified after about two hours by Standard Bank and immediately shut the site down - or at least I tried to. Then it seems the hackers managed to get the site reactivated by pretending to be me and sending spoofed emails (obviously not from my account) to SiteGround, so opened the site again and allowed the attackers to resume their scam.

After being notified again and sending more CAPS-locked text to SiteGround the site is now permanently dead. However, i neglected to realise that when i set up the email for my domain, that i linked the email address for my new domain to my GMail account and so today i was notified that these scumbag hackers managed to get into my GMail account too.

Now i've changed my passwords so many times, had all my cards cancelled, and spent the last day or so trying to reboot my identity. The worst part is that when i gave Vodacom the IP addresses (the attacks came from the Vodacom ISP) they just didn't care. They told me i would have to complain to SiteGround. SiteGround are the biggest bunch of utter morons to have ever walked the earth and choose to do absolutely nothing to try and trace the originating IP address and customer. They STILL don't think it's a problem to send passwords in the clear. It took be nearly a month to convince them to refund my subscription money.

Anyway, it's deeply disturbing to think that criminals have hacked your email and brings into sharp relief just how much data about YOU is online. In the past two years I've had to fend off attempted hacks against my PayPal account (now closed), by Ebay account (now closed), my GoDaddy account (now closed), and now SiteGround (now closed). I'm now in the process of downloading all my email and removing anything stored on internet servers. This is a huge pain but until ISPs and retailers start to take security seriously, i just cannot trust doing anything on the internet.

Some conclusions: choose your hosts carefully; only shop at reputable retailers; only ever shop with your credit card; don't buy anything expensive; change your online email passwords every 2 months; and don't store any personal information (Address, DOB, Full Name, etc) whatsoever online. Basically, go over to the wall and pull the telephone cable out of your broadband router and go back to that huge dusty Yellow-Pages they keep insisting on delivering.