| The Breakroom > The Water Cooler |
| My email's been hacked.... |
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| andyf:
Yahoo emailed me today saying there had been a suspicious log-in on one of the email accounts I have with them. Looking at my log-in history, they're right - I don't recall making a return flight to Mexico this morning. Seems they grabbed my contact list, but there's only one address in it, being that of an account I have at Hotmail (or Outlook, as it now calls itself). Sure enough, on looking at the Hotmail account, I found a message in the spam file purporting to come from me at Yahoo, inviting me at Hotmail to click on an evil looking link. Anyhow, I've changed the password on the Yahoo account, and on the Hotmail one too, just in case. Yahoo Mail seems to be particularly vulnerable to this sort of thing; I'm a mod on a large Yahoo Group, where we see one of these spoof messages nearly every week. Usually, it purports to come from a member with a Yahoo address, or from an ISP which farms its email out to Yahoo. I suppose the moral is to keep as few addresses as possible in your contacts, and don't list any forums or groups because that might result in a mass dissemination of spam which seems to come from you. Andy |
| clivel:
I would dearly love to see people boycott Yahoo until they either change their attitude to fraud or are driven to the wall and closed down. About a year back I started receiving a large number of the "Nigerian Scam" emails. The kind where the writer has $16Million trapped in a bank account and they have picked you out of all the people in the world to help them "liberate" the money for a hefty percentage of course. And as far fetched as these stories are, enough people do get actually get caught to make it profitable enough for the thieves to continue running these scams. As a result, instead of just filtering and deleting these emails I thought that I would at least try and do my bit to put the thieves out of business by forwarding the emails to the abuse department of the various email service providers. For the first few months most of the free email providers were evenly represented, hotmail, gmail, aol, live, yahoo, etc. on forwarding the emails to the abuse department I would receive an automated reply saying that they would look into the matter and take any necessary action. Invariably a test email the following day to the relevant email address would be returned "address unknown" confirming that the email account was closed. The only odd one out is Yahoo. Instead of taking action Yahoo sends an automated email response directing one to a web page which explains how a Yahoo account holder can report received spam. There appears to be no mechanism for non-Yahoo account holders to be able to report emails received from a Yahoo account :bang: So it doesn't really surprise me that Yahoo is particularly vulnerable to that sort of thing, they really don't seem to take user security too seriously. I still get a few fraudulent emails on a daily basis, but now 100% of these emails have a Yahoo return address because Yahoo is the only email provider that condones fraud. Boycott Yahoo! :( |
| Divided he ad:
Not been done myself... But received 5 or so over the last month. They're pretty easy to spot. Usually not much text involved. Most people put a little conversation in don't they? I will take note of where they come from next time.... See if it's all yahoo :scratch: These kinds of people are really annoying..... Surely they don't trap that many people? If my outlook gets hacked.... Quite a few people are gonna be cursing me :wack: Ralph. |
| clivel:
--- Quote from: Divided he ad on April 27, 2013, 02:46:59 AM ---I will take note of where they come from next time.... See if it's all yahoo :scratch: --- End quote --- Actually I should have mentioned that it is not actually where the email purportedly comes from, the from email address is nearly always faked. It is the reply-to address that is the important one. If you hit reply on one of the emails (without actually sending it), you will see that it is to a different address. |
| andyf:
Below is a copy of the one that arrived in my Hotmail inbox below. Hitting the Reply button set up a reply correctly addressed to my hacked Yahoo account, but this spammer is trying to get me to click on the dangerous link, not to reply to him saying I'll help to get the late President's ill-gotten gains out of Ruritania. My email addresses have been partially asterisked for security reasons. Same with the link, in case anyone clicks on it, though I'm sure no-one here would be daft enough to try that. Andy > Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:45:53 +0100 > From: andy******@yahoo.co.uk > Subject: RE(8): Andy Franks > To: andy******@hotmail.co.uk > > referral link http://tonerkozpont.com/************wp-content/themes/weaver/ekopun.php > > ///////////////////// > From: andrew franks 4/26/2013 2:45:43 PM> |
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