Virus attack on my Yahoo email - how did they do that?
Discussion
I just got a call from a friend of mine thanking me for forwarding him details of a great website for buying Viagra. "Eh?" I replied...
Turns out my Yahoo POP account sent an email a few hours ago to selected members of my contact list with this website.
As a Mac user I'm just not used to dealing with viruses and I'm baffled how this happened especially considering I wasn't even logged into my computer, let alone my email, when the message was sent.
How did they do this and what can I do to prevent it happening again? I've already changed the password on the account and I've trimmed my contact list to minimise future impact. Can anyone throw some light on this for me?
Turns out my Yahoo POP account sent an email a few hours ago to selected members of my contact list with this website.
As a Mac user I'm just not used to dealing with viruses and I'm baffled how this happened especially considering I wasn't even logged into my computer, let alone my email, when the message was sent.
How did they do this and what can I do to prevent it happening again? I've already changed the password on the account and I've trimmed my contact list to minimise future impact. Can anyone throw some light on this for me?
One of the emails went to another email address of mine and I could see the list of people copied on the email. They were all on my contact list but oddly not all of my contact list was copied, only randomly selected accounts, many of whom I haven't contacted in years and was frankly surprised to see them still on my Contact list.
seaninog said:
One of the emails went to another email address of mine and I could see the list of people copied on the email. They were all on my contact list but oddly not all of my contact list was copied, only randomly selected accounts, many of whom I haven't contacted in years and was frankly surprised to see them still on my Contact list.
Possibly, one of your contacts that has you and your other contacts in their contacts, has a virus that has spoofed your email address. Or something. 
cjs said:
One probelm is people sending mass emails and including all the addresses in the To: or CC; fields rather than send them in the BCC; field. A couple of freinds and companies I know do this, I then have a list of all their contacts which I or someone else can spam!
I don't send such mass emails - never have from this account - and even so the list of randoms picked from my Contact list included my fiancée, some fellow PH'ers with whom I've had contact over the years, the help desk of a former car insurer and my stockbroker; there is no way they would ever have been on a distributed mass email together!! It's all very odd what's happened. I can only assume my password was compromised so I've changed it and strengthened it.
got some slitty eyed fellow using my email address as a spam mail, need to get his website details and run an automated html file on it, to constantly reload the images, worked well for artists against 419......
got another guy sending me love dates, all from his special site in malaysia, need to do the same for him as well
as to the op, have you ever posted your email address on the net ?
can see postings made back in 2002 with my old email address on a forum, dumped the account after getting 10k spam a month
got another guy sending me love dates, all from his special site in malaysia, need to do the same for him as well
as to the op, have you ever posted your email address on the net ?
can see postings made back in 2002 with my old email address on a forum, dumped the account after getting 10k spam a month
Scraggles said:
as to the op, have you ever posted your email address on the net ?
Yeah, I probably have. But how does that make this kind of an attack possible? How does that leave me vulnerable to my contact list being compromised and emails being sent.They must have hacked my password, no?
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