My email account has been hacked!

LincolnshireYokel

I use web based emails, and i arrange them in rings of three - email a has alternative address as email b, email b points to email c, email c point s to a.

so if i cant get into one, i make a new password request and the new password goes to the next alt in the ring.

NinkyNonk_2

The link address doesn't really make sense as to what it is all about.

So hackers will have a computer to do the hacking as it is quicker and in hope of getting complete hold of my pc?

I have lots of protection. So I am wondering how this happened in the 1st place.

Will contact yahoo.

Am I right in changing my email addy and passwords to all the accounts that are with this email addy?

johnnyboyrebel

NinkyNonk wrote: »

The link address doesn't really make sense as to what it is all about.

I was just wondering what the email actually was, if it was a 'you have been chosen to be the beneficiary of 4,000000 ugandan dollars' then this would be a 419 scam which would suggest someone manually sending it. If it was 'get rock hard quick https://www.rockhard.com' then this is most likely computer generated.

NinkyNonk wrote: »

So hackers will have a computer to do the hacking as it is quicker and in hope of getting complete hold of my pc?

Woah there, I never suggested this at all. All I said was there is very little to gain from simply logging into some random person's email address. This is why the latest scam is for them to call you and try to claim they are from Microsoft etc. so it is highly unlikely you have been chosen to be manually hacked into.

The reason for spam emails being sent out such as the example above is unknown in many cases. It could be to earn affiliate payments from every click of a link although as many spam emails have no link or indeed any text then this doesn't explain that. It is simply a spam email, do not think that you will now all of a sudden notice a virus on your pc which gives someone remote access to your pc. Many people like to scaremonger so my advice is dont listen to them!

NinkyNonk wrote: »

I have lots of protection. So I am wondering how this happened in the 1st place.

Will contact yahoo.

Am I right in changing my email addy and passwords to all the accounts that are with this email addy?

It happens to the best of us and to the biggest companies in the world.

It is entirely up to you if you change all your passwords. If you are no longer planning on using it then it doesnt really matter.

NinkyNonk_2

johnnyboyrebel wrote: »

Woah there, I never suggested this at all. All I said was there is very little to gain from simply logging into some random person's email address. This is why the latest scam is for them to call you and try to claim they are from Microsoft etc. so it is highly unlikely you have been chosen to be manually hacked into.


It is entirely up to you if you change all your passwords. If you are no longer planning on using it then it doesnt really matter.

Sorry, I'm not entirely up on computers and I panic at the slightest bit of bad activity and think the worst is going to happen.

At the moment, I'm also using my laptop to do activity until virus scans finish.

I'm changing all my passwords to the accounts with money transactions involved. And I'm having a seperate one for emailing friends so hopefully they'll never get anything like this from my future account.

WhiteChristmas

NinkyNonk wrote: »

I have lots of protection. So I am wondering how this happened in the 1st place.

It could be one of your contacts who has been compromised by a worm. Your address may have been harvested from their address book and "spoofed", hence there's nothing in your sent folder - the mails appear to have been sent from your address but weren't really.

NinkyNonk_2

I've been researching into how this has happened and I'm a little confused about "spoofing".
I understand that it is highly likely that this 'hack' was done by computer not manually. Some of the addresses that it was sent to were places that I had emailed once sometime last year (for example). Nearly all but not entirely, all of my friends email addys are in these 'failed to send' emails. If it was manually, someone wouldn't have hunted out some random email addy when they could've had all of my friends. Also, there is one to myself. It looks like my email addy sent an unknown link to my own email addy. This also makes me think this was not done manually coz why would a spammer send a bad link to the person s/he has hacked? BTW, I have only once sent myself an email which was sometime end of last year.

From my researching, I have found that it is likely that the 'hacker' did not send these emails to myself and my friends using my yahoo account but used my email address to make it look like I had sent them and the 'failure notice' emails look like from yahoo.

What I'm confused about is the login activity from Hungary. If the above is correct, then why is there this bad login activity here? And in the 'from' is my initials (which is what I always have for my emails). To me, the login from Hungary suggests that someone was in my account.

Please could someone explain so I may understand

Also, I had logged into paypal and ebay before my emails and saw what had happened. Avast and Malwarebytes has found nothing so do you think I am safe?

When do you think the hacker could've gotten hold of email addy? I had logged into my email account around 12pm and had signed up to a new website using to similiar password to my email account. And I had gone onto some websites to do a bit of shopping but decided not to buy so hadn't logged in.

NinkyNonk_2

A few months ago, a friend (or so it looked like) sent an email to me. This was to another one of my yahoo accounts not the one that was hacked yesterday. I stupidly clicked on the link but my protection caught it. I'm guessing it same thing had happened to my friends account (though he never said anything).
Could this be connected to my incident yesterday? The 2 yahoo accounts have no connection with each other except that they both had the same passwords (they no longer have).


With the hacked account, I'm getting the typical phising emails. But I did laugh at the one 'from' co-op bank with the email addy [EMAIL="'phising@co-op'"]'phising@co-op'[/EMAIL]. They could've at least disguised the phising.

I don't know if this is related but for the past week or so, when I'm searching for items on ebay, scrolling through the list, I keep randomly being taken to a page which is not found. It begins with tags.kaiblue or something like that.

LincolnshireYokel

NinkyNonk wrote: »

I've been researching into how this has happened and I'm a little confused about "spoofing".
I understand that it is highly likely that this 'hack' was done by computer not manually. Some of the addresses that it was sent to were places that I had emailed once sometime last year (for example). Nearly all but not entirely, all of my friends email addys are in these 'failed to send' emails. If it was manually, someone wouldn't have hunted out some random email addy when they could've had all of my friends. Also, there is one to myself. It looks like my email addy sent an unknown link to my own email addy. This also makes me think this was not done manually coz why would a spammer send a bad link to the person s/he has hacked? BTW, I have only once sent myself an email which was sometime end of last year.

From my researching, I have found that it is likely that the 'hacker' did not send these emails to myself and my friends using my yahoo account but used my email address to make it look like I had sent them and the 'failure notice' emails look like from yahoo.

What I'm confused about is the login activity from Hungary. If the above is correct, then why is there this bad login activity here? And in the 'from' is my initials (which is what I always have for my emails). To me, the login from Hungary suggests that someone was in my account.

Please could someone explain so I may understand

Also, I had logged into paypal and ebay before my emails and saw what had happened. Avast and Malwarebytes has found nothing so do you think I am safe?

When do you think the hacker could've gotten hold of email addy? I had logged into my email account around 12pm and had signed up to a new website using to similiar password to my email account. And I had gone onto some websites to do a bit of shopping but decided not to buy so hadn't logged in.

there are multiple worms and viruses around that can hijack your email account and address book.

david39

I have read that you are more likely to get your email address hacked if you do not log out at the end of each session, or set it to "keep me logged in".

I don't know why this is so, but I always log out since having the same experience as the OP.

torbrex

My Yahoo email account was hacked a couple of months ago, I spotted it before Yahoo did and changed my password a few times in quick succession, logging out then back in again a few times with each password.
I then got an alert from Yahoo stating that the hack had been traced back to Spain of all places and advising me to change my password.

About a dozen emails had been sent using my address book but the recipients realised that they were not from me and deleted without clicking on the contained link.

It was only the online account that had been affected, nothing had penetrated my computers defences.