Special Thanks to GoDaddy, PayPal and Google Mail

On October 14, we got hacked - our web sites were deleted, domain names were deleted, our Google mailbox hi-jacked, and our PayPal account also hi-jacked. Luckily, as we had come back from Timor earlier than planned, we discoverd the problem within hours.

The first step was to recover our domains (particularly baliv.com and balivnew.com) and get email to these domains working again.  The GoDaddy 24 hour telephone support was excellent, and once I established my identity, they were quick to descibe what the hacker had done, and guide me through recovery steps.

While we use email to addresses at baliv.com as our main points of contact, all the messages are forward to a Google mailbox - so this our main archive of everything that has happened.

To recover the mailbox, I filled in an on-line form with many details that helped them identify me as the true owner.  They then retrieved the mailbox and allowed me to define a new password.  This process very rapid.

So, we are really impressed by all these service providers.

And how did we get hacked?  We are not sure of exact details, but it relates to lax management of passwords.  I tended to use the same password everywhere so probably registered an identity on a site that was really designed to collect useful passwords.  Now we have a much stronger and safer approach to passwords.