Email Hacked

budfly

Has anyone else had recent experience of emails being hacked.Two of my friends who comp have yahoo accounts and both have been hacked this week. One hack was traced to Japan.

The result being that their accounts send all their contacts spam messages that look like they have come from the actual friend. The messages contain links to god knows what.

I was just wondering if this is a common problem. Yahoo suggest that changing your password should fix the problem incase its happened to anyone

catbear

I had the same thing this week, my Yahoo was hacked and all my contacts received an e-mail supposedly from me, I changed my password and have had no further problems.

Melli

Not happened to me recently, thankfully.
They've often set up a re-direct to notify them if the password's been changed.
You need to make sure the notification settings are set so that the reminder/re-set password goes to an email address you recognise (alternative email address you set up)
eta - by the sound of it, these hackers were a bit more basic!

caitieface

Agree with Melli, good idea to check all settings and make sure it's not been linked with another account then change the password.

Also, I wouldn't put much stock in the whole 'traced to Japan' thing, any hacker with half a brain cell is going to be behind a proxy which disguises their location.

Editing to actually answer your question, I got off on a bit of a tangent there...in my experience? Absurdly common. Best thing you can do is keep your self anti-virused up to the eyeballs, seperate complex passwords, etc etc - but then I do that and my email got hacked a while back. Pretty sure certain email providers have flaws in their system that allow hackers with the right tools to grab accounts at random. Unfortunately it's the internet and it happens.

blackmidnight

I use gmail and have set up the 2 stage verification system so that if I log in to my emails from a new computer I have to put a code in which is sent to my mobile phone. I'm hoping this will give me a bit more protection.

Zanzib

As I had it explained to me it's not been hacked just compromised- hence them telling you to change your password. It does stop it as they can no longer use your account to send spam e-mails.

Two members of my family had this happen to them and me, and other people I know too.

Usually the e-mails have No Subject in the title area, and the e-mail contains a link- don't open it.

My OH's boss got one and it crashed the computer.

trulys

I had this happen to me on my old Yahoo email account a long while back, but just this week I have seen a number of spam emails, all from Yahoo emails. My elderly neighbour asked me if I had problems also, as his Yahoo email had sent out these messages to all his contacts.

When mine was used, as well as sending the email to all my contacts, all of my 'sent' messages were deleted.

I decided to steer clear of Yahoo, and opened a Gmail account instead - maybe they can suffer the same issues, but I rarely see spams from anything other than Yahoo to be honest!

OneYorkshireLass

Yahoo are terrible for security problems and I've just decided to terminate my account as all my contacts (and some people whose addresses are just in my inbox) were spammed. This is the third time it's happened with my Yahoo account even though I always have 'very good' passwords.

Two members of my family have not only opened the emails, but also opened the link inside it, despite many warnings from me not to do this if it looks remotely suspicious - grrr! Luckily Avast! stopped anything from happening, but I always run a scan to be sure.

blackmidnight

Looks like it's been happening quite a lot with yahoo accounts as notice webusermagazine asking about this earlier: https://twitter.com/webusermagazine/status/309296003939454976

OneYorkshireLass

blackmidnight wrote: »

Looks like it's been happening quite a lot with yahoo accounts as notice webusermagazine asking about this earlier: https://twitter.com/webusermagazine/status/309296003939454976

Phew, glad it's not just me. Yahoo HAVE to do something about this. When my Hotmail account was hacked they picked up on it straight away. With Yahoo there's been nothing and, thinking about it now, the past few times it's happened there's been no communication from them which is pretty poor.

Hezzawithkids

Yes its happened to me twice in the past week with my yahoo email account. I've now changed the password but if it happens again I'm going to cancel the account.