Possible Stolen Password; any desktop worries?

[murderd2death]

I recently recieved an email from a gaming company I used to associate with many years ago about how recently my account has had 'an unusual change in my access pattern'. It was recommended that I change my password for my e-mail and this that and the other; I have several different passwords so i'm not to particularly worried about this area.

Recently though, before I received the email when I created an account on cisco's website I have reason to believe that some information I entered may have been compromised (there were some points were I noticed I had been redirected to false websites.) The passwords I use on my desktop, and just about everything else, is different from the passwords i've used for this gaming website or cisco.

The one thing that has me worried about this particular issue is that during times when i'm not using my computer, it seemed that my CPU would spike for no apparent reason. I've done a minimal amount of poking around and discovered that one of my keys is broken and malfunctions and decides to enter itself on a long string until disrupted- for example, I might get on chromium and then my search bar will fill itself with a long line of "hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" until I press another key to make it stop. After this string stops, the CPU usage goes to normal. I'm not to sure if that is normal or not for broken keys to make a worn down laptop run one of its cores on the fritz.

I'm just curious as to whether or not any of this should be a concern for me, if anyone else has run into this issue before, or what measures I could take with applications to help beef up security. Thanks.

[Ms. Daisy]

Change your passwords & make them all unique, that should take care of that problem.

Use the

top

command to determine what's using the CPU when you see it spike. I'm guessing it's automatic updates or something benign.

Replace the keyboard if you keep getting weird key behaviour.