Greetings and Salutations -

Thank you for your patience today during the server hiccup, and thank you to the alert editors who notified me of the issue. This was the second time in the past month that a hacker has guessed at an editor's email password and then went to town sending out spam messages until we realized what was happening. Clearly they're enjoying their game a little too much.

The outgoing spam is not only bad for us in email terms, since it makes websites think we're a spammer, but it also greatly slows down our system as well while it is going on.

I've now set up alerts so if an account starts sending out mail at a high rate I get notified about it.

I'm also working with the mail company to see if we can set up a three-strikes-and-lock system, like we have on our admin menu. If a hacker starts making random guesses on our admin menu, once they miss guess number three that login gets locked. That way the hacker can't guess all night long until they get it right. I'm trying to see if that can be done on the mail side as well. Hopefully there's a solution that blocks the hacker from just sitting there guessing, guessing, guessing until they get it right.

I'll let you know when I have an update. In the meantime, if you have an easy to guess password, please update it to something more complicated with numbers and perhaps symbols. When you change your password in the main admin area it automatically updates your mail password, too, so that stays in sync.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Many thanks!

Lisa Shea, owner
BellaOnline.com

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