If you have an account at Etsy, either for selling or buying, I suggest you log in, go to settings, and change your privacy settings. Everything you do (buy, sell, rate) is now publicly viewable and is being logged in search engines, including associating your real life name (if entered) with your username.

http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2011/03/etsy-users-irked-after-buyers-purchases-exposed-to-the-world.ars
Apparently, and as far as I can tell this's true, for a while GMail had a security hole that hackers were able to take advantage of. Specifically, the hole allowed hackers to steal your GMail password, and alter the filters in your GMail account, so that it would forward and delete emails with certain subject lines or keywords, so that you'd never see them in the first place, and they could also send email from the account. In the article linked above, an individual who did this found himself scammed out of a profitable webpage that he owned. For you as an individual, you could find yourself losing bank account or credit card information, for example.

The hole is now fixed, so no new hacks can happen, but what you may wish to do is take a couple minutes to check out the filters in your GMail account and make sure there's nothing there that is bad - although no new hacks can happen, if they had hacked you in the past and you hadn't noticed, the filters would remain. If you have many, do a search on the filters page for "forward" and "skip" (for skip Inbox) and that should catch the bad ones.
If you have ever been employed by Johns Hopkins University, or been a patient at the JHU Hospital, there is a chance that personally identifying info about you has been stolen. Nine backup tapes containing the info were "misplaced" en route to being further backed up, and their best guess is that a trash collector picked them up, but they're not sure. The tapes included employees' SS#, birth date, and direct deposit info (where applicable), and patients' demographics.

If you were a student who was not employed by JHU, including nerd campers, you do not have to worry.

More info from JHU here. They also have a page w/ links to the three credit reporting bureaus, where you can get your free yearly credit report, and you can also ask them to put a fraud alert on your account - this will make it harder for both illegitimate people AND yourself to do anything. I'm going to do it.

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asterroc

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