Hacked again

Not too long ago my debit card got hacked.  Today my Comcast account got hacked.  I got an email this morning that a "secondary" email had been updated and now had full access and could pay my bill.  If I did not authorize this, to contact Comcast.  We have Comcast for our internet, phone and tv. I have a Comcast email that is my main email. I can access my account and do quite a bit with all our Comcast services with our online account. I can change things related to our phone, listen to voicemails, send texts, order pay per view, etc.  I did have 2 secondary accounts, one for DH and one for DS that I had set up in the beginning, but neither of them used it.

After getting this strange email, I got on my account and noticed a new email account with unrestricted access had been added! I deleted it and then went in to try and change my security question/answer and password. It let me change my security question, but I kept getting error messages when trying to change my password. I decided to wait and try later.  Later in the afternoon our phone started ringing just once (almost a partial ring) and then nothing. It got so it was doing it repeatedly, about every minute.  I got online so I could get Comcast's phone number to call and see if they could tell me what was going on and noticed our phone number was now being forwarded to some number in South Carolina and there were now 6 new email accounts added! EEK! I unforwarded the phone and the one ring calls stopped. (I tried calling the number it was forwarded to a couple of times and got busy signal).

I got on the phone with Comcast and they changed my password for me, then had me log in and delete the added accounts and change my password to something else. The customer service guy said a similar thing happened to him and he was told it was compromised by hackers either using a program that takes known email addresses and searches each possible combination (this could take months or longer) until it hits on the right password - or my computer had been infected with a "key logger" virus where the hacker can see as I'm typing the password. He said his email was used to send out spam to his contacts. He recommended running a couple of programs to check for this - which DS did and they came up clean. I'm hoping it's just a case of the first example, where a program lucked into finding this one password, rather than a hacker seeing me enter all my online passwords.

I am impressed that Comcast's security system was on top of the changes being made and notifying me so I could check into it quickly.  Hopefully, no other damage was done.