Blueyonder email address hacked

[1043590]

Hi, my primary email address of username@blueyonder.co.uk was hacked not long after I received an extortion email a week ago telling me to pay up to avoid compromising photos of me being distributed to my accounts. Worryingly, the email included the genuine password for my email account. I've changed My Virgin Media password and the password for the client app I normally use to access my emails. I'm not sure if this change feeds through to my webmail password. The Virgin Media site says it doesn't but an agent says it does. 

My hacked email has been used to access my Etsy and Ebay accounts - I've arranged for these to be closed. I've also set up active forwarding on my username@blueyonder.co.uk account but some has used it to access my Shopify account. I've now closed it. So my email address is floating about on the internet ripe for misuse. 

Ideally I would like to delete my blueyonder email address but I understand I can only do this if I cancel all my Virgin Media services. Is there no way of replacing it with a virginmedia.com address? Also, how can I be sure the blueyonder.co.uk webmail address has been changed and so avoid it being hacked again?

Many thanks

[Joseph_B]

Hey @1043590,

Welcome to the Community Forums and thanks for the post.

Sorry to hear of the issues you have faced with regards to your email account we wouldn't be able to delete the account until the account is closed off as stated already, with the security of it, a password reset should work perfectly fine and allow this to be safe, however you may still wish to report this here.

Joe

[1043590]

Many thanks Joseph for your reply. Can I check one thing - I changed the password for My Virgin Media account (which I sign in with a Google Mail account) when I discovered my blueyonder email address had been hacked. I remember reading somewhere on virginmedia.com that changing the password on My Virgin Media account doesn't feed through to my webmail address but an agent told me that it does. I think the agent may be right because I can log into the blueyonder account once signed into my Virgin Media account.  I've since set up automatic forwarding on my blueyonder account to my Gmail account which is very helpful! 

[Alex_RM · Accepted solution]

Changing your password for My Virgin Media should allow you to sign in via webmail, for any email clients you would need to set up an app password. Details of which can be found here under 'Setting your app password to use an Email app'

Alex_Rm

[ALF28]

It is wise to regularly change both the VM account password and the app password which is for email clients at the same time and also update  the security question, all of which is done in the VM account settings and verified by a pin sent to your email. If hacking is suspected, the password changes would fix that. It is important to use strong passwords with numbers, special characters, and upper and lower case letters.I recently checked an old password that had been hacked from the past with only 7 letters and had been hacked 95 times and was used in a blackmail email recently.

Also use a third party email to login to VM  with two factor authentication which is very secure and keeps out the hackers.