security problems

lililou

hi there
i hope someone can help last night my ebay account was hijacked and someone listed a ton of uggg boots. luckily i saw this before i went to bed so contacted ebay who fixed it . however i got up this morning and the same thing had happened again. Not only that i can't gt into my hotmail account today either and there is tons of stuff in there. Some are confirmation passwords too. I contacted hotmail but am still waiting for a decent reply apart from the standard have you done this etc.
I've just come back from town and someone has tried to get into ebay again, this time i have an email saying my password has been changed etc in arabic or some script that my computer doesn't recognise. The first one was from China. I can get into my account though.

Any ideas - this is a nightmare. They also tried to change my moneybookers account but luckily it was a different password.I've changed contact emails on most of my accounts that involve money but can't think of anything else to do.

How can I check what's happening?

lililou

I use a mac by the way.

superscaper

Do you use the same obvious password on both ebay and hotmail then? I.e. could someone have guessed that hotmail account was for the same person your ebay account and then simply tried the same password?
Otherwise worst case scenario is that you've got a keylogger or something on your pc so to be honest it doesn't matter if you try changing your password. You should go through the malware removal sticky to make sure your pc is clean anyway. Then change your passwords etc AFTER you know you're working on a clean pc.

As for your hotmail account if you can get into it or reset your password yourself (i.e. did you give a secondary address, security questions when you set it up?) then do that as relying on a human reply is a bit pointless. These free email accounts are only free because they work on minimum human support and it's unlikely you'll get the account back without doing it yourself. If you get any kind of human response then you'd be very lucky.

superscaper

lililou wrote: »

I use a mac by the way.

Then it probably is a clean computer and you'll just have to use sensible passwords and I'm presuming your accounts that had the same passwords were easy to guess as being the same person. Have you fallen for a phishing email recently?

lililou

Hi there That's the thing - they were different passwords. Also I can't clean it in the same way as I'm on a Mac so it's slightly different. I tried to reset it but I htink the secondary address is ancient as I haven't got an e-mail. The answer I give for the security question is wrong.

lililou

No but I have registered with a load of cashback sites and got pmd by someone else to try a few they recommended. I'm wondering if I used the same password for that one.I'm so angry about it.

sidthesexist

If it were me i would start by doing numerous spyware and virus checks to see what is running on your machine? ( is it one of the newer mac's running windows?) i would then fit/run a decent firewall to stop anything to send information in or out without my authorisation . As i believe the above poster mentioned you will likely have to change your passwords again after you are sure that you have removed any malicious programs that are running on your machine otherwise if they are still running when you have changed them they could send the hacker the new password as well?

lililou

I did a virus check last night and nothing came up. Not sure how to do spyware though.

bookduck

lililou wrote: »

I use a mac by the way.

Very surprised at this as macs are some of the securest around.

I have to agree with superscaper

My other guess guess is you have joined a forum, given your email address and also used the same passwords for your email as the forum(s)?

My next guess it that you have been surfing and you use the "remember passwords and sites" (or equiv) option and your password has been 'harvested'

Personally, I think you should have bought a pair of ugggg boots, and since you dont have paypal, offer to send them a cheque or postal order to get their address?