What To Do When Your Email Is Hacked

It happens all the time. In fact, in the last two days, both my mother and my aunt have had their email hacked. When your email is hacked, it is potentially a very dangerous situation. Quick and decisive action is absolutely required.
Once your email has been hacked, the hacker normally tries to send out a few emails to your contact list. Here is an example that I received from my mother. The link goes to a scam where you can make millions working just a few hours a week. If it is too good to be true, it probably isn’t.
So if you receive an email from someone that looks wrong, you must notify the person immediately. You can respond to the email telling them they have been hacked. Better yet, give them a call. They need to act quickly or things can spiral out of control quickly. More on that later.
Since the hacker has no way of knowing the good contacts versus the bad contacts in your email list, they send out to all of them. Another way to tell if you have been hacked is when suddenly you are bouncing a lot of emails to people you have not sent email in years (or longer).
Having your email hacked is a very very dangerous situation. The reason is that your email is essentially the hub for everything you do online. Your bank account, your Amazon account, and so on. When you forget your password, where do they send it? To your email. So now that the hacker has access to your email, they now have access to a lot more! Perhaps your entire life.
So Step 1 is to change your email password. As has been covered in so many articles, make a password that is hard to guess. The problem is that hard-to-guess and easy-to-remember are contradictory. But this is important for you (and only you) to figure out. As soon as possible after learning your email has been hacked, change that password.
But unfortunately, your work is not done. If the hacker knows your email password, you probably are using that same password for many other places too. You need to go and change your passwords on all of those other accounts as well.
After you are sure that you have changed all your passwords, you can breathe a sigh of relief. Having your email hacked is a horrible feeling, but if you act quickly by changing your passwords, you can minimize the impact to a little embarrassment to your email contacts.

Has your email ever been hacked? What did you do?