Now I'm not saying all ebay sellers are good news, but remember that a lot of ebay accounts are hijacked. Don't neccessarily hate the sellers, hate the hijackers!

The same thing happened to my account (read above).

Yea they are quick that link is allready dead!
Thanks anyway. It'* just that I'm looking for a car trailer and I'm afraid of getting them.

Because of hijacking and other things, you and some others would probably feint if they saw the kind of passwords I use

This is off topic in a sense, but I want to share some thoughts:

I'm going to jump on a soapbox here for a moment as this touches on what I do for living. It has been statistically proven that 95% of people who actively connect to the Internet use poor security practices at best.

How many people use either one or two weak passwords for the majority of thier authentication keys? That nice Citibank Online password? Same as your login to BC!! That Pr0n site we all know you use? Same password as your Savings and Loan. (Would scare you to death if you realized how many people with a prior criminal record operate illicit websites.)

Please folks, consider using multiple strong passwords containing both alpha and numeric characters, as well as a few special characters. Change your passwords every 30-60 days. It would really suck to find out that one of my BC family was wiped out by a SSN, Social Engineering, or Weak Password attack.

FYI: Social Engineering for those who are not familiar with the term is quite simply asking for information. You'd be surprised how easy you're willing to give up your proper name, address, SSN, and passwords.

Thanks Mortehl for sharing the information. I too am in the field of IT (computer junkie) and you make some very good points on internet security.

Scary thing is my ebay password was a very strong password using lower case, upper case, numbers and special characters. That'* why I believe somebody was keylogging. But I think I've secured that from happening again... I hope.

Gah. Other people have access to your 'puter? And do you share the passsword with other websites? Hell, do you use the password as your shell or ftp login for any personal web hosting? I had one very interesting case about a year ago with my wife. She used a very good password on her private web hosting which was on another company'* server (long story) and someone (who I actually later tracked down to be in the viscinity of Prague) employed a dictionary attack. Because the server was not properly secured, the attack literally ran for I think 7 or 8 straight days before it was nailed.

Well.. long story short, she used the same password to access an image server I host for her. Found some ******* attempting to rootkit the box from her login. BIG mistake because I tracked the bastard down.

Back to your computer. You want to run programs that log all registry changes and review them periodically. Watch your system32 directory for files that have recently been added. (dir/o:d is your friend ) Shut and LOCK your system down.

I'm sure you know all this, but I'm putting it out there for those who don't.

Thanks Mortehl for the advice. I know you are right but it is such a pain sometimes to have to know a hundred different passwords and change them so much. At work alone I have 4 or 5 that have to be changed every 90 days and have to be no less than 8 characters with numbers, letters, some caps, etc. It is very specific what it will allow. I can't keep up with it all. I will try to do better.

i use four different passwords. one is a pain in the ***, the others are so easy that they could probably be guessed, much less survive an app attack. i just dont care. theres not a single thing i do online that contains important information for me. all my bills are paid thru a check in the mail, i dont order things online, and i dont even have a webpage anymore. my computers been hacked a number of times, mostly viruses and such. my antivirus is fdisk.

on a sidenote... how cool would that be on a tshirt? - "fdisk is my anti-virus."

I pay most of my bills online at work because they have the most up to date protection.