Dr. Lakin's New Non-secure Email
As many of you may already know, my AOL email, douglakin@aol.com, was unfortunately 'hacked' last week, actually 'spoofed' as AOL calls it.
I want to reassure you that no medical information was involved and any information you relayed to me via email was not compromised.
As an immediate measure, I terminated my AOL email account and going forward, all communication between patients and myself are being conducted either through my Secure Patient Portal messaging or my new non-secure email, douglakin@doctordoug.com.
We are also in the process of archiving all my old emails from the AOL Mail server for any future reference.
This incident is a very good reason to sign up and use the Secure Patient Portal.
If you are not already registered, please contact my office, 480.614.5800, or my office manager, Nan, and we will be glad to assist you.
Yours in good health,
For more information on 'spoofing', please read the recent article
from PCMag regarding AOL Mail:
If you've received any strange looking emails, you might want to refrain from touching them. AOL Mail has been compromised by hackers, and people are getting tainted emails, according to PCMag.
However, this isn't your run-of-the-mill case of hackers taking control of people's accounts and using them for nefarious purposes. The cyber criminals are employing a method called spoofing to fool people into opening these messages.
Here's how AOL describes spoofing, according to this official blog post:
"Spoofing is when a spammer sends out emails using your email address in the From: field. The idea is to make it seem like the message is from you - in order to trick people into opening it."
AOL also says that the messages don't come from AOL, and do not make contact with AOL Mail's system, and are merely manipulated to make it seem like that to the recipient of the message.
Fortunately, there are a few ways to tell whether you're the target of a spoofing attempt. If you get any "mailer-daemon" error messages that don't match up with any emails you've sent out, that could be a sign that you're a target. You only get such messages if you attempt to send an email to an account that doesn't exist or is no longer active. Also, if you get emails from accounts which also indicate that you sent them messages you didn't write, you might be a target of spoofing.
To combat this threat, AOL recommends that you change your password, but considering that spoofing doesn't necessarily mean your account is compromised, we're not sure how doing so would help here. Overall, if you're Eagle-eyed, and follow the above tips you'll likely be able to avoid any spoofing-related headaches.