 Hey, Wyatt says my Microsoft account got hacked and they changed the email and password and I can no longer log into my account. Hey, Hal, this sounds like a conversation you and I had about my system a couple months back. It says that my account doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't work with my phone number or email. What can I do? Thank you, Microphone. Not all of them, a lot. Unfortunately, let's see, where am I here? I need to get back into our little shady thing. Okay, there we go. Yeah, under a circumstance like that, if they've gotten in and changed your email address and your password then what that's telling you is correct. Once an email account has been deleted, it's gone. It can never be reused again. It goes into a database that's essentially never, never land for email addresses. Is there anything you can you call Microsoft support for that? Is there anything they can do? I mean, that's the- You can't call Microsoft support because that's, I've got a couple of links here. One of them is helping with micro-counted with your Microsoft account recovery. Another one is how to recover a hacked or compromised Microsoft account. The thing of it is, particularly if you're talking about email, that's all done through an automated service Microsoft personnel don't even have access to that. Yeah. This is one of those situations where, I mean, I know I can preach enough. The issue that I had was that I had a number of accounts of different people and it's a demo system, so that the impact was minimal. I had MFA turned on for every one of them except mine. That was compromised. It wasn't this, they didn't delete anything, they weren't able to go and do anything, but they hacked in, messed with some things, I was able to go and correct it. But it's just annoying and it took a bunch of work, and after a couple of days of resetting things, no data lost or anything, so thankfully. But why it's so important to turn on MFA, to make sure that you have a secondary recovery email, that you get notifications like, I have no fear of that anymore because I realize daily how annoyed I am to have to prove that I am me for normal logins. How much harder it is for hackers now to get in. A couple things to remember about MFA, you want a bunch of different second factors. Your main one is going to be username and password, but those second factors, there are so many cases that I see where, that old phone, I don't have it anymore, I can't use the number. That old email account, I don't have that anymore. Hey, it was supposed to call me, but it's a landline and I can't get text messages on that. Yeah, Microsoft made that mistake from my way of thinking and I about get caught with it because I've got an outlook.com account and was in there looking one day and then instead of seeing a voice that says text and it's like, no, you can't text that number. But you want as many of those different things as you can. There's another one in dealing with your Microsoft account there is a QR code that you can use as an emergency, get back, get out of jail card, essentially, that you can generate from your Microsoft account. Take a picture of that. It's a QR code, hold that in front of your PC's camera and I mean, I've never have been in a position to do that, but that might be something that in a circumstance like this might get you back in. But literally, if they have removed and deleted, your user account, that's Microsoft takes that seriously, that user account is gone. It is no more. Yeah, that's incredibly malicious when you think about it. Which means please turn MFA on, please, I'm begging you. This is not the normal thing where they are hijacking your account or using it to spam out emails. This is pretty malicious and I think it serves as a good example and I'm sorry that this happened to you, but it's these email accounts become an extension of your online identity and they do need maintenance, whether it's a security checkup wizard that might come with the email service, password hygiene, all that type of stuff, it shouldn't be that thing where we are creating that free email account and never touching that password again for 10 years. I think all of us are guilty of that at some level, so I'm not suggesting why that you're doing anything wrong. You're doing what everyone else in the world does, but it's to the point now where our identities are pretty valuable and they're all connected to these types of email accounts. So lesson learned to lose your email account. And there's so much you can lose with all that. I mean, I'm a pack rat when it comes to my email. I mean, I've got stuff going back to 2007, 2008, 2009, back when I first got the account going. Not much necessity for that these days, but a lot of memories, a lot of photographs that hang around those emails that I've forgotten or even there and I go back and look at, oh wow, you know, that kind of thing. It could be exceedingly important and you really, MFA ain't that big a thing to set up. It's a switch and giving them a couple of different things to go with and for the most part, it is entirely unobtrusive. If you're doing something regular with the same set of devices, it will remember them. It's not gonna bug you again until you come in with something you don't know about. And even then, you're only gonna get bugged once and as long as you continue to use that one device, you're home free. Yeah, the only issue I run into is I mean, so the issue I run into with MFA is just because of my VPN, you know, and so then it doesn't recognize me each time. But it's like during the day, it's fine, maybe once in a while in the middle of the day, my screen will time out so I'd get up for lunch or something come back and I'll have to log back in. That's why Authenticator on the phone is your best friend with MFA and it's, I'm happy to jump through those hoops to not have to go through the pain of losing data and yeah, being in fear of that. Having had a couple of clients that have gone through that with ransomware, like that's when I went in to check and thought I had turned on across the board with all of the various accounts for the missed one.