Help! My AOL has been hacked into!

Rosemarie44

Hi Techies!

Over the last couple of month emails have been sent automatically from my AOL account with links for stuff that I would not be promoting. I have been told that someone has managed to hack into my account and so these emails are being sent to all my contacts.

If you are an EXPERT in such matters then I would appreciate your advice as to how I can stop these emails being sent from my account. I am not a techie so I would really appreciate you explaining the steps in plain, simple language please. Just pretend you're talking to a 5-year old!

Hoping to hear from any experts out there because it bothers me that some people think I'm deliberately sending them such links.

macman

Are you sure that someone has really hacked your account, and it's not just address spoofing? If it has been hacked, then the emails that purportedly come from your PC will have copies left in the Sent Mail folder. Are they there?
If it has been hacked, the first thing to do is to change your password (however, if it had been hacked, the first thing that is normally done is to change your password, so you wouldn't be able to log in anyway).
So, change your password anyway as a precaution.
If it's address spoofing, just ignore it.

googler

Change your password.

Close the current account, and set up a new one. Tell all your contacts that you're changing.

macman

In fact, switch to Gmail for your online account-vastly better than clunky old AOHell.

Rosemarie44

I checked my "sent" box and it is full with these emails that I didn't send. I'm assuming that there's no point in changing my password because these emails will still be sent from that account. Does anyone know how I can stop these emails being sent from my account?

Squirel

Hi,

Seriously *change your account password*
And do it *now*.

The presence of messages in your sent items folder would appear to indicate that you account has indeed been "hacked"/"compromised"

If *you* don't change your password, then there is every chance that the "hacker" may change *your* password to one that *only they* know

At which point you have completely lost control of the account, including losing the ability to send and receive emails *and all the contacts held by* the account.

Also I would tend to agree with the switch to another "email provider" like Gmail (i.e. Google mail).

Even after you regain exclusive use of your email account (assuming that you can), then the "hacker" may well still have a *copy of* all your contacts, so even if neither you, nor your account still send messages to your contacts, there is nothing stopping the hacker sending emails to your contacts, pretending to be you

So you should warn all your contacts to check any emails that *appear to have come from you*

This is another good reason to ditch the compromised AOL account
But please do change your password if at all possible anyway

Regards
Ian (a.k.a. Squirel)

macman

OP, your response makes no sense. Once you change the password the hacker can no longer access the account. Spammers don't manually harvest contacts and spam them!
if you don't change it immediately then you may not get the chance. And use a stronger password.

steve1980

And get rid of AOL!

Rosemarie44

Thanks guys! I have changed the password. This is an old account so I no longer use it for sending emails but I do check it regularly just in case someone tries to contact me. I do have accounts with hotmail, gmail and yahoo so most of my contacts have my updated email addresses.