Ok, so longish story.
I have a group of online friends.
And then there was this guy who now hates us. He is... obviously mentally ill and very revengeful.
A couple of months ago, one of our friends got hacked. Someone had taken all his online accounts, and he's a bit famous in the photography scene in his region, so we figured it migtht be someone wanting to take over his online life or something. When he managed to get his accounts back, shortly after his accounts were taken again and all got deleted.

And I just discovered another of our friends got hacked and lost his accounts too. Out of the blue.
So we can't help but think it was the guy who hates us. He has free time enough to learn how to hack. And we think he's trying to attack all our members.

Of us all, I'm the only one who would REALLY be hurt by it. I'm trying to make my Poser store be my living, use it to pay my bills, etc. And slowly succeeding. If I lose my account... Well.

Is there a way I can be sure my Renderosity account will be safe? As in, if he's actually discovering passwords and such, and he takes over my account, is there a way for me to take it back, to prove it was hacked? If he deletes it, is there a way to recover it?

I'm just too worried about this. Thanks in advance.

Afrodite-Ohki

Hi Afrodite-Ohki,

I am very sorry to hear about your unfortunate circumstance.  Are you saying this person hacked your friends Renderosity accounts or just online accounts at other places in general?  Renderosity has quite a number of security measures in place so your account here is very safe.  I'm asking about your friends accounts because of our security measures, I'm assuming you meant online in general but I want to be sure.

Thank you

One of the best things you can do is to make sure and use what are called "strong passwords". When you put a password on your account, try to do these things with it:

1. Make it seven or 14 characters long, 14 being much better. Making the length a multiple of seven makes some cracking algorithms perform much less efficiently.

2. Use a combination of upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, and punctuation. Specifically, have at least one of the second through sixth characters be a symbol (again, makes it much harder for hacking).

3. Do not use any information about you in any part of the password, even if you write it backwards or use some other way of writing it. Don't use your name, birthday, place of employment, or any such information about your family or friends.

4. Generally, try to avoid using common words by themselves. It may help to remember a longer password by running two or three short words together. Capitalize every second or third letter, replace the letter "e" with a "3" or other such change. For example, "$Ca2.uP_a/tRee" might be easy to remember, because it's based on the phrase "cat up a tree" but doesn't have anything to do with you.

5. Change your passwords frequently. Do it as often as you need to feel better, but at least every six months.

6. Never use the same password for any other location. This can be a real pain, but if you use the same password over and over again at every web site you use, and a hacket gets one of them, he's got them all.

7. If the web site offers a "security phrase", do not give real information. For example, if the security phrase for your account is "What is the name of your first pet", say something like "BobbyDobby" (unless it really was).

8. Never, never, never, ever, write your passwords down, or keep them in a file on your computer. If you forget a password, get the web site to mail it to you using whatever method they have. Then change it immediately. Same thing goes for your security hints.

9. Do not give your passwords to anyone, ever. Even if you're on the phone and you're sure that you're dealing with the real company, they don't need to know your passwords or security hints.

10. If you're talking to someone, even someone you know well, don't talk about your passwords. If someone is telling you all their passwords or their "I got hacked" sob stories and they tell you how they always use mom's birthday backwards, resist the temptation to be sympathetic and say, "Yeah, I do something like that, too." I mean, be sympathetic all you want, but don't give out your password strategies. Even a friend may repeat it to someone else that they don't know is fishing for your stuff.

I do software development for a company that keeps confidential medical data, and we use password techniques similar to those (plus a couple of others... a fella has to have a few secrets...)

Stacey: no, I'm sadly not actual friends with anyone in Renderosity (though I'd really like to be), I meant accounts of things like e-mail, Flickr, Facebook, Orkut (which is a site like Facebook but more used here in Brazil), blogs and such. None of them actually works using the internet, though the photographer I mentioned uses his internet profile a lot to advertise his gallery showcases and the parties he organizes. I don't doubt Renderosity's security at all, I've never heard of anyone having a problem with an account here, but I guess it won't hurt to really protect myself all the ways I can. Actually, my greatest fear is that he can get a hold of my password some other way, hence why I asked if I can retrieve an account if that happens, and if I can have the account back if he gets my password and immediately deletes my account. Right now I'm researching for the best antiviruses and firewalls I can get, to block his access from my computer and the things I type.

CaptainJack: aw, wonderful to get hints from an expert in data protection. For what I see, II've been keeping myself very safe in that. 12 characters long pass, I'll just have to throw in another two it seems, already has numbers, letters and punctuation, I'll switch some characters to lower case. There's no personal info in there, nothing easy to figure out. When people chat about passwords, I do say I put personal info to remember, but that's a lie LOL. As for security phrases, I actually get angry that some sites force you to add those... I pick any question and just hammer my keyboard with my fingers randomly until I reach the max length allowed hahahah

Thank you both for the replies. And Stacey, I have a couple of questions, if you or some other Renderosity employee could answer them I'd be very happy.
-If somebody does get my password and use it, is there a way for me to prove my account was stolen?
-If an account is deleted, does Renderosity leave it in a backup for a few days for security reasons or it just immediately goes to nonexistance forever?
Thanks!

This might be a good time to start backing up all you can to an external hard drive.

Annie, nobody I know lost any data in their computers, only internet service/community accounts.

But I do back up my things.

My fear here is that I lose my Rendo account because I'm slowly building my name as a merchant, plus there is the credit account money, and I also feared that I could have problems if I lost my account, tried to sell my things with a new account and could get accused of plagiarism because people might not believe I'm the same person.

Afrodite,

We don't delete/remove accounts, we just close them upon member request but those have to go through admin and we have several security measures in place that we check before doing that. If they got into your account (which is your password is strong is highly unlikely) they could delete your gallery images, wishlist, etc.. Anything you can delete yourself if you are logged into your account.
We also have measures in place that would be able to detect if it came from someone different than yourself although we couldn't restore gallery images if they were deleted.

I don't think you have anything to worry about with your Renderosity account to be honest though.

Captain Jack, very good information! Thank you for helping

Thank you very much, Stacey!
That's quite conforting to know. Though, come to think of it, store products can also be deleted I think, but that would also have to be approved (and if the worst happens, I could just re-upload them later, I guess).
Yesterday another of our members was hacked. She only lost her messenger account. It seems his way is finding out the passwords, because she only used that password for her messenger. If it is so, well, I followed all of Jack's tips. :D

Good Afrodite, I think you will be fine:)

I would have your friends talk to the Major crime or Internet crimes division of your Local Police Department.

When my Paypal Account was hijacked, I immediately shut everything down and asked the police what can be done. The Officer was the one the referred me to Major Crimes.

Given the push on Cyber-bullying of late, also see what laws can be applied there as well.

natolli is correct.  When there is reason to believe that a specific group or individual is being targeted that may also constitute cyber-stalking which is illegal.  Hacking is a federal crime as well, no matter how small.

Things are not that simple here in Brazil. Justice doesn't work too well, and this would probably be seen as a silly quarrel between internet youngsters.

Ah, but where the servers are located could be of assistance, probably not much.

Did they contact the companies that were hacked, if anything they'd want to look into how their security was breached.