Google, Gmail & Phishing…Oh My!

February 25, 2009 · Filed Under SEO Tips · Comments Off

In case you’re one of the 10 people left on the planet who didn’t know, Google’s Gmail service had an outage in the early morning hours (U.S. Time) due to an update they made to one of their servers. This downtime lasted several hours but eventually was fixed. Google made a comment about the outage on their Gmail Blog.

If that wasn’t enough, a new phishing scam made its way around Gmail Talk which is a chat program embedded in Gmail by default.

Those who were targeted in the phishing scam would receive a message via Google Talk that appeared to come from someone in their contact list and that contained a link. If you clicked on the link you were taken to the ViddyHo.com website which asked you to re-enter your gmail username and password. If you did that your message quickly became spread to all of your Gmail users and your online account at Google may have been compromised.

Since this phishing scams discovery, Google has now blacklisted the website, blocked the instant messages and many popular web browsers such as Firefox, Safari and Chrome alert you now to the fact that this website cannot be trusted.

If you were one of those affected, Google encourages you to change your Gmail password immediately.

Web security experts estimate that more than 40% of internet users use the SAME PASSWORD for every site they access! Most often this is due to the fact that people don’t want to have to remember a password each time they log in to a site. But as you can tell from even this small demonstration having someone get your password is a fairly easy task.

I personally suggest the use of Roboform. Not only can you generate passwords that are extremely difficult to guess but it will remember the logins of every last site you visit for you, safely. You can get more information and download a free trial version below.