Password compromised

[Countrymun]

Hello,
We just received a spam email to our business gmail but instead of addressing us by name, it addressed us by our full password.

I can't understand why someone would do this. If you hacked an email address, why would you let the person know you had their password? Anyone had anything similar happen?

Thanks

 

[Nuno]

Crap bit of hacker programming. Change all passwords now, and not to the same thing. Try to avoid '12345'

 

[YouMustBeLiam]

The hacker has made a mistake, when you send emails you can use HTML to fill in the gaps, as you can probably imagine writing "Dear Liam" and "Dear John" for each and every customer in a companies database can be time consuming, which is why services exist where you can e-mail thousands of customers immediately without having to manually enter the recipients names.

You got lucky this time as instead of the hacker making it send to the recipients email, they accidentally used the password, which means that you can change each and every one of your passwords immediately. Don't just change your password, change your security questions and also your recovery email too. If they have your password they can use recovery email and security questions as a backdoor in the event of a password change, so change every details right now, count yourself lucky too.

 

[nnrocks]

Fortunately I never got such email but that would be most shocking moment of my life. I know few password managing software (mostly free for individuals) like lastpass, Password Genie, roboform etc. I have used lastpass its really good.