Pasayten's Methow Valley Bulletin Board

I like Farmers State Bank in Winthrop... No unwanted texts, email, regular mail... Locally owned and run...

My GlacierBank accounts go into hard lockdown if they are used outside of the valley. At all.

With advance warning I can authorize online transactions. But otherwise they are only useful in Winthrop or Twisp.

If I may, Alf: I wouldn't necessarily call this a "hack", per se. Odds are it was not a PayPal vulnerability that enabled the actor to spend your money, but rather a vulnerability in how you've configured your identity with paypal.

you have a couple of options to firm this up:

- set up multifactor authentication. So it pings your phone or sends you an email to confirm you are you when someone uses your password and email to sign in. You can get an app to generate a random key, or notify you to approve, or an email with a code.

- get a password manager. I can't emphasize this one enough. The idea is that you create a "vault" for your passwords, and create a really complex passphrase that you can remember to get in. Once you're in, let the password manager auto-generate all of your passwords and save them for you, so you never re-use the same password (this is the important part). Get the plugin for your browser and the app for your phone and have it autofill stuff for you. In the meantime, check your email address(es) on https://haveibeenpwned.com/ to see which passwords (that you're probably re-using) have been hacked and released (actually hacked).

Did they correctly guess your password? I use very complex passwords for paypal and other financial services. I get lots of fake phishing emails trying to get me to log into my paypal acct also to harvest password info...