Yahoo email server hacked worldwide? Or is it just me?!

agarnett

I remain disappointed, tronator, because you seem unable to grasp that real life isn't just about remote individuals each at just one computer receiving one little spam mail of no significance. Real life is indeed something that witnesses billions of emails daily and those sort of numbers seem to phase you. I can assure you that big numbers like that do not phase real offensive or defensive computer programmers !

Perhaps it is now the majority of us who receive more than one spam email everyday, but all spam which is volume addressed using illegally acquired lists should by now be routinely tracked and the perps routinely prosecuted by government. The traffic patterns created are easy enough to identify. GCHQ has been sniffing and soaking up everything for years!

I think the reason why the government appears to have no appetite to act is because politicians and mandarins in the civil service know that their pals in the corporates are constantly engaged in illegal trading of personal data and that the government is also tied up in secretive collection of it via "partner" organisations such as Experian and Google, as well as its own shadier activities carried out from behind high fences and policed barriers!

In the last week I had to seriously curtail using Google Chrome because Google would no longer let me use the search engine without me clicking the "I Agree" button on a pop up wanting to gain my permission to let them record all they like about my activity. Naturally they can go forth and multiply as far as I am concerned.

Funnily enough, this evening they seem to have relented and got rid of the "I Agree" screen that blocked my search results until I Agreed. Or maybe they have taken some random Return Key click on my laptop as an agreement which they've falsely recorded now on their databases and in return stopped the pop up appearing?

I am sure millions have in the last week clicked on "I Agree" just to get past that pop up. It is wrong that they should have been coerced that way - the majority of people have no idea what they are agreeing to.

I only bang on about all this because although I can largely protect myself, and you and wongataa can protect yourselves, most people cannot. So when wongataa says simply delete spam and move on with life, where is the thought spared for the poor unfortunates who do not even recognise spam and click away innocently on such mails when they arrive, and quite possibly have no internet security packages installed?

I have a brand new laptop with Kaspersky installed and IBM Rapport. Despite that, in addition to the Google "I agree" pop up I mention above, I have twice in the last couple of days noticed something else which is very weird. When attempting to login to a couple of financial sites requiring username and password and where both my Kaspersky and Rapport installations are clearly aware of the need for secure input on those sites, I've experienced the following: One of my usernames is a string of numbers yet when I start entering it using Google Chrome, it comes out as abcdefghi ! Something similar occurred on another site when attempting to login. It is as if the keyboard is mapped incorrectly, but it is set up perfectly correctly, and I am using Chrome at this moment to post this with no problems.

The phenomenon I describe is completely replicable. If i go back to the bank webpage and start typing the same numbers, out comes abcdefghi. I haven't a clue what is causing it or if I should be worried about it. Actually for the time being I am worried about using Chrome for logging into important websites for fear it is being hijacked by a keylogger or similar. But I have done a full Scan with Kaspersky and it has found nothing suspicious.

Meantime I nevertheless am now using another browser for secure browsing because I no longer trust Chrome.

Anyone else stopped trusting Chrome for anything important? Or is it just me again?

Johnmcl7

Considerable time and effort has been put into stopping mail, it just takes far more resources than you seem to realise. You dismiss tronator's posts out of hand but they've all been correct particularly in terms of the global nature of the issue making it very difficult for any particular government to stop the culprits.

The good news is progress on tackling the problem is seeing some impressive progress with spam mail dropped below 50% of total bandwidth usage, the first time since 2003.

John

agarnett

Johnmcl7 wrote: »

Considerable time and effort has been put into stopping mail, it just takes far more resources than you seem to realise. You dismiss tronator's posts out of hand but they've all been correct particularly in terms of the global nature of the issue making it very difficult for any particular government to stop the culprits.

The good news is progress on tackling the problem is seeing some impressive progress with spam mail dropped below 50% of total bandwidth usage, the first time since 2003.

John

So ... tronator's posts implying nothing more can be done / not worth bothering about were ... er ... what shall we say ... just a tad in -correct ? Perhaps you both know a little of how deep it goes "global" at Cheltenham and elsewhere and would both prefer we let the considerable resources get on with it without us delving further?

petebrace

This spamming does seem different to what I've seen before, if only because it is so widespread. Many people I know who have Yahoo! mail have sent me spam, similar to the one described above (The subject is always "From: [Friend's name]"). It seems like their contact lists have been hacked somehow.

Having received many spam emails, I logged into my Yahoo! (which normally just forwards to my main email), wondering if it had been compromised, but most of the people weren't in my contacts. Not long after this though, several people (perhaps all) in my contacts list received similar spam from me.

I read one article which talked about a bug in Flash allowing hackers to compromise Yahoo! through their Flash based adverts. This happened the same day I received the first spam message. According to the article, the bug has been fixed a long time ago, but I still receive loads of these emails. I haven't logged in again and no further emails have been sent on my behalf.

The similarity of these emails and the pattern of sending suggests to me that there is some malicious code that can access Yahoo contacts and automatically send these emails and it is still out there - perhaps people using old Flash code or maybe some malware on their computer (although I'm fairly sure I don't).

It seems strange that there is not more information on this, as these attacks have been fairly constant for over two months.