PlusTV Gmail Account is Hacked

There have been several persons reporting of their emails having been hacked; they’ve been locked out and security barriers put in place preventing them from regaining access. One such case is that of PlusTV in Belmopan. Its managing director, Louis Wade Junior says that since three p.m. on Tuesday, he lost control of the company’s main email and by extension its YouTube channel. Wade Junior describes the hacking as sophisticated because of the changes that were done, including installing two level of security that PlusTV did not implement.

Louis Wade Jr.

Louis Wade Jr., Managing Director, PlusTV

“There is a cell phone and a laptop and all the other systems are attached to that particular account that we do some of the work at PlusTV. I was out in a rural area for about five hours and so this is not a phishing event where we clicked on a wrong link or went to a wrong page. This is not what happened cause one device was totally off the net, off the grid and the second device, which I had personally, was not attached to doing any particular work with emails. I could not access our YouTube channel and it was at that point that I asked if someone had simply made any changes at all to the YouTube channel to which the answer was no. So at that point, I went to the backup Gmail account. So there is a Yahoo account that is linked to the Gmail account so if there are any issues on the Gmail account, a notification would be sent to the Yahoo account. And when we checked the Yahoo account it said that someone had changed both the primary and secondary verification on the account. So it said if you don’t want it to happen, click here. When we clicked that, the link had already expired. What the hackers did that we know for a fact that it is hacking is that number one, as I said, there was no phishing. Number two is that they changed the password and then they dislocated the option where you can use an old password. The use of an old password was dislocated, the cell number which gives you a notification was also dislocated and then the secondary email address that you can use to verify was also dislocated. So, whenever a verification is requested, it goes directly to the same account that was hacked.”