Help! Hotmail & Gmail Hacked

bookduck

hebangsthedrums wrote: »

Hi there everyone,

...I stayed in a hotel on Weds and used the wireless - I think this may be the cause, but I only have myself to blame - the network was unsecured.

Don't feel bad about this as even if it was secure via a pass code, it would probably still have the same key encryption code as other people's staying there circumventing internal security and making you open to a plethora of things.

Think superscaper, hit it on the head with his malware sticky comment. The question is why your av did not pick it up? Only other way is that they were sniffing, but the p/w stuff should have been secure via the padlock, making malware the No.1 choice of intrusion.

While they still have access to your email(s) still say they are you.

Just check your sent items - you never know what they left behind in haste.

hebangsthedrums

Cheers for the reply. Any ideas as to how they got back into my account?

bookduck

Once in and that can that can leave the door open for many visits. Services can be opened, duplicate administrator accounts can be made, Exe can be renamed as .doc, tasks can be set up do do things remotely, remote administration can be turned on. firewall ports disableled, or a combination and all will pass the virus checker.

Then there are the hidden place where you normally cant look and rootkits too. Rename a trojan as a normal file or wrap the trojan around a normal exe file it will have the correct name and look ok in hijackthis. add on backorafice etc. so you can remotely 'administrate' the server while it is being used.

Put on a keystroke capture prog that emails out the results you type including p/w changes and the real txt in those asterix fields etc.

To be honest, you rarely know or can be certain what has really been done or modified by the hacker. Usually the securest route is to ditch everything, reformat and start again from scratch building on a known good setup, then configure, put on your security apps and then plug it in the net. In practice people including myself rarely do this as we are lazy and dont want to loose things.

If you want to be secure move away from windows. Go to linux or better still BSD or best is the old Apple operating system (not OSX, but the pre linux one). The price of having a windows PC is that if it is on for long enough or you surf enough, you will eventually be hacked either via the above or via a web page or email or word document or the irrisistable app/game you will install. Yes, you need to be vigilant.

Saying all this there is the old 80/20 rule where 80% of the work is done in 20% of the time. Same with PCs why work hard to take over 20% of PCs but it takes 80% if your time, when you can take over 80% just with a basic set of commands scripts and greed (the PC owners greed of something for nothing) and 20% effort (if even that).

The key to stop it happening again is by realising how they got in. With all windows OS it seem that one door is closed, a few more a left open and many are left to be discovered.

The best guess of when it happeneed was the time/date stamp if the file.