Heads Up : Email Hacking Incident

Thanks for the warning, but since you said your password was fairly safe with special characters and numbers, a brute force hacking attack is unlikely.

Are you sure you didn't use the same password (or a very similar one) one some other website or wrote it down somewhere (digital or in the real world) where someone else might have gotten access to it?

azmanar,

The spammer isn't targeting you personally. This is a very common problem with freemail systems. I've gotten a lot of this sort of spam from addresses at AOL, Yahoo, and Hotmail.

Check your computer for keyloggers.


Paul

Never had any problems like that but this is the 2nd time I've heard of this sort of hack. Scary!

Maybe he didn't hack your password. Maybe he guessed your Secret Answer, which isn't hard for family / friends / ex-family / ex-friends to do!

How worrying... I hope everything is okay now?

My hotmail got hacked too, they send about 3 or 4 emails a day to each of my contacts telling them to click on links. I was just going to delete the email account. So annoying

This is what a good friend on the WF had to deal with just the other day he found this...

And this was a free email account, the mind wonders why they do this:rolleyes:

Jason

Actually,

(a) He is probably not targeting you personally
(b) You probably have malware (i.e., a keylogger/scraper/etc), installed on your system. You usually get those types of viruses from either visiting porn sites or using "cracked" software, so if you are doing either, you should stop. The other method is usually if people forward you "attachments", and you inadvertently opened one of those thinking it was from a friend. Obviously, do due dilegence when opening those.

Easiest way to stop it from happening is to 'clean' your computer. That means backing up all your files, then restoring the operating system, and then reinstalling 'clean' files.

Then you won't need to worry about that. Chances are if he is doing it for one account, he is doing for all your accounts, and you just haven't noticed yet.

John

My brother in law got his Hotmail account hacked last week. Maybe this is bigger then what he think?

Hi Guys,

Thanks for all the pointers. It seems I'm not alone.

I like to think myself as a very careful person. However from this incident, obviously it is not good enough. Have to be more vigilant.

Each of my accounts (emails, forums, yahoo groups, services) have different passwords. Never written on any paper. All being managed digitally by a self-made application. No one else uses my beloved laptop ... lol .. not even my wife.

I never use public computers. Have 2 other development PCs which I never use to login emails. My laptop is the only one I use to login emails. If ever I use public networks such as hotels, I'm on an https proxy.

And there are no virus-prone applications from Microsoft except for the OS on my laptop. Zero pirated software because I respect other people's hard work. Software I use are mostly bought from reputable sources.

Despite all that, "keyloggers and trojans" were my first suspicion. Have 4 updated anti-viruses running together (with all the works). Had scanned and found none.

Could be some new keyloggers yet to be identified by security software firms. Could still be a new kind of brute-force tool, which is my second suspicion.

If ever there was any infection, it could have come from my downloads. This could be the leak.

Still looking into this matter. It is a wake-up call for me.

The reality is that in today's always connected online digital world, anybody can be hacked at any time. There's no such thing as 100 per cent safe. Look at all the security breeches at major corporations that have compromised credit card data. And they have IT departments working to protect them. The digital world can indeed be dangerous so just fight the good fight and keep improving your security. Frequently changing passwords is one of the better security measures but it's also one that very few follow through on cause they hate the hassle. On corporate networks this can actually be enforced automatically but the resistance to this was shocking - usually by top management, the ones with the most to lose. Oh well.

Thanks for sharing your own experience .I am a bit lazy in changing passwords but now I will be careful

my friends why don't you all reconsider changing to gmail account
it's easy to forward all you incoming email to it and
set sending email to be the same like you send from your site email
i'm using it in my iphone and in my pc it's really easy also when your password taken
gmail will send you to your mobile number message

I have no problem with that. My yahoo emails have gotten hacked too. Good thing I don't use them for anything important and have loads of them.

Have you considered the possibility that your email account hasn't been hacked and that instead somebody is spoofing the "from" header of emails using your email address?

This just happened to me last week with my Gmail account. Seems fine now that I changed my password, but it was definitely a bit alarming to see someone email their crap to my personal contacts with no real idea what was in store for those who clicked the link.

I tracked the link down, found the affiliates links in the source code, and tracked the domain through a whois search. Amazingly the idiot who hacked my account is listed publicly on a GoDaddy server.

Which reminds me, I need to call over there, and file a complaint, and see if I can get em shut down.

Hackers suck!

All that intelligence being wasted on "Blue Fart" techniques, and screwing with another's livelihood... I say we string em' up and beat em!

All the Best,

Art

Hotmail, AOL, and yahoo are the most hacked email accounts on the planet. Seriously, if you research it there are solid statistics on this stuff.

Grab a gmail and you'll have 10x the protection you did with hotmail.

Good luck buddy!!

There seems to have been a wave of such things in the last week or two. I've seen a couple of my contacts that have yahoo (or att/yahoo) addresses with a similar fishy email sent out. Really with hotmail/yahoo last I knew logins were passed plain text across the network. So.... the #1 easiest way someone would do this is - if someone is sitting at a wifi hotspot and pulls up their mail page the person across the room from them could be sitting at a computer collecting email addresses to play with. All it takes is the right tools. It doesn't matter if it's an open wifi or encrypted - if everyone in the room has a key to it... it doesn't make things private.

It wouldn't have to happen on wifi - I sometimes wonder if we put too much trust in our internet service providers (or someone that works with them) to not be searching our plain text communications like that. Gmail at least forces https on mail logins so you can at least narrow down the ways you might be compromised.

As for brute force - really with the right setup it's just a matter of time and computing power. If someone wants to get in. Many well designed firewalls will clamp down on lots of failed logins from a single ip address and I've seen some lock a username for a period of time with a failed attempt. But if your patient enough and have a distributed network of machines for your attempts... it's still do-able.

I think the 2nd easiest way someone might have done it is by guessing answers to favorite questions - but that typically forces a password reset.

Of course -the other thing is if a password is shared with multiple sites - and one has a database compromise... then they might know your mail address and guess that you've used the same password.

It seems to be harder and harder to stay one step ahead...

Avery

I always add one of my (other) email addresses into my contacts. That way if someone emails all my contacts, at least I'm in the loop. lol