hotmail broken into

frankie1star

I written to MSN and told them that my account has been breached, its a fairly dormant account. Emails have been sent to my contacts including myself and my daughters, and the other contacts in my list, not many, and possibly dormant. But I am worried about the implications. I realise I will have to change my password but should I worry about anything else. I have several hotmail accounts, as well as others.

hethmar

When this happened to me some years back, it was a virus that came in an email and then went into my contacts lists and sent old emails at random to them, most embarrassing.

frankie1star

does anyone have any recommendation, other than changing my password. Will it have any implication on my other email addresses

kwikbreaks

There is no need for anyone to have actually accessed your hotmail account and most likely nobody has - it is just that a spammer got hold of your email address and is now spoofing it. The emails are almost certainly not actually being sent from your account so changing the password will not stop the problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_spoofing

As already mentioned your contacts have been harvested by a virus so run a scanner and try to get shot of it ASAP.

frankie1star

my virus software is up to date, it concerns me also as this hotmail is one specifically set up for our ebay account, which was breached as well,

nickoran

ive had the msn one before where it tries to send friends files to download when your not actually on, simply changing my password worked, hopefully there arent ny further implications, just make sure everyone on your address book is as savvy as you so they dont get the same virus

Kane99uk

With your eBay account being breached as well then I'd definately look at changing your passwords. I would also recommend not using a webmail service such as Hotmail for anything linked to your bank details, such as eBay, Paypal etc. Use it for forums where bots are likely to be scanning emails for marketing purposes, but keep a private account for anything that involves money.

Before you do go changing your passwords though, make sure you run scans with both your anti-virus and malware removal programmes to make sure you've nothing nasty waiting to grab your new details as you change them

frankie1star

luckily most of the contacts were dormant or my immediate family, but maybe i should just close this hotmail account completely, and link another one to my ebay account

kwikbreaks

If your eBay account was compromised it was either because you were fooled by a phishing email (you get an email asking you to sign into your account for which they thoughtfull provide a link to the login page) or you are infected with a keylogger.

It sounds to me like your PC is pretty well infected. There are some stickies in this board offering advice on the way forward short of nuking your PC from orbit which is only necessary when AOL or Norton software has been installed.

hethmar

Your ebay account was breached? Im surprised you didnt mention that first! How do you know this happened?

frankie1star

I know my ebay account was breached because ebay blocked us using it, so I had to speak to their online help. I didnt know because we dont use it very often and it was only by chance I wanted to sort a problem with an order.

hethmar wrote: »

Your ebay account was breached? Im surprised you didnt mention that first! How do you know this happened?