As one of you who received the fraudulent email last week from the church put it, “What a pain in the @#Q#$!” Indeed, that remark was more prescient than he could have known.
There is no guarantee that it will not happen again, sadly. But I have moved our DNS server to one with more security features, changed every password I could think of, put in place a temporary block on all emails going out from our originating server, and a browser validation halt on the website. Pretty much the only thing you should notice for a while is that when you visit our website you will have to wait 5 seconds. That is intended.
As far as I can tell, and consider this unsolicited free advice, when I last changed the password on our email, I was in a hurry and chose “Changeit” for a temporary password. Well, I never did. Don’t ever do that.
When I logged in to our originating server Monday evening after taking Taite on a college visiting trip, I discovered that our DKIM had been changed. DKIM is an email authentication technique that allows the receiver to check that an email was indeed send and authorized by the owner of that domain. This is done by giving the email a digital signature. Take control of the DKIM and you have control over the email. That has been corrected, and a block put on all emails leaving the server, just in case.
Thank you to all who alerted me to this matter. Now back to more important things!