BMW Winning Notification.

This was the subject line of the more than 6,000 e-mails that were sent out from my work e-mail account, via a hacker, to Lord knows who in about 1.5 hours yesterday morning.

You might be wondering how this could possibly have happened. Well, it all started on Tuesday evening when I noticed an e-mail from our system administrator telling me that I had exceeded the storage space for my e-mail account. The message said that I would need to delete messages to free up space, and then click through to a link to re-activate my account.

When I got to work yesterday morning, I realized that I had, in fact, not been getting e-mails and had a bunch sitting in my outbox, which I figured was due to exceeding my account limit.

So I clicked through the link in the e-mail from (what I thought was) our IT System Administrator. I entered in my e-mail address, user ID and password information for the network and clicked enter. The e-mails sitting in my outbox went out the door to their intended location, and my e-mail started to back-update from the time that I had exceeded my limit.

I then headed off to a meeting. During which, my blackberry was vibrating non-stop, notifying me of a new e-mail. Finally, I look at my phone only to see that I had recieved some 500 e-mails in about 30 min!!! They were messages from the System Administrator saying that an e-mail with the subject line BMW Winning Notification was undeliverable. I thought that was really, really, wierd, but I had to stay checked-in to the meeting I was at.

About an hour later I was back in my office and I called our IT Help desk to figure out was going on. At this point, I was up to some 6,000 e-mails telling me that some e-mail that I didn’t send about winning a BMW was undeliverable, apprently to many, many, many people!!

Before our IT desk could help me, he said that I had to provide my anniversary date for security purposes. I automatically assumed he was referring to my hire date, which I never, ever remember correctly. I told him that I thought it was either September 17, 18 or 19.

After I said this he laughed and said, “Gee, sounds like you’re really happy with YOUR marriage! You don’t even know your anniversary!”

I quickly explained that I am very, very happily married and I assumed he was asking for my anniversary/hire date here at work….

Our help desk guy then tried to be nice about the whole crazy mess of a  situation, but told me that I very foolishly gave out my password to a hacker, and that our IT staff will never ask for my password. Ugh! He then, probably rightly so, talked to me like I was an 80 year old woman who didn’t know what a computer was.

Oh brother!

Talk about embrassing, annoying and funny all wrapped up in to one!

The undeliverable messages are still coming in, by the 100s, but it really is  a much slower pace than yesterday and our IT folks assured me that this will all stop soon.

So, if you got an e-mail from me saying you won a BMW, I’m sorry, you really didn’t.

And I kind of defer my absent-minded, less than stellar-sharp behavior on the fact that Linden is getting 2 molars right now and decided to start yesterday at 4:45 a.m…yes, I am blaming my 15 month old.