E-mail hacked..Now what?

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jimmy
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E-mail hacked..Now what?

Post by jimmy »

Well I woke up this morning to the sound of a dozen returned e-mails on my I-phone. With a closer look I realized my e-mail was hacked and e-mails were sent out to probably everybody in my contacts (not the way I wanted to start my Saturday morning). The e-mail sent in the subject line had "breaking news (and my name)" with a link inside the e-mail. Since I'm not that tech savvy I just wanted to know what I should do now for security purposes since this has never happened to me. I was told by a friend to change my password which I have done. It's a yahoo account if that matters.. Anything else I need to do? Also how could this have happened and how can I prevent it from happening again. Thanks all..
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InvestorNewb
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Re: E-mail hacked..Now what?

Post by InvestorNewb »

Run a virus check on your PC. If you don't have antivirus software installed, you can use the Free version of:
http://www.superantispyware.com/index.html

(I once had an infected PC and this was the only software, among 4-5 others that I tried, that was successfully able to rid the trojan.)
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hicabob
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Re: E-mail hacked..Now what?

Post by hicabob »

Yup - sending those viagra ads to everyone in your contact list is not in the best of taste - At least run Microsoft Security Essentials - it can find/delete most malware ... foolproof way to fix it is to reformat and reload the operating system. It seems from the recent news reports that everyone's email is hacked these days anyways :shock:
enderland
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Re: E-mail hacked..Now what?

Post by enderland »

What type of email account?

If it is a google, you can use a 2-step verification process which sends your phone a text message code prior to being able to login on a new machine.
Sidney
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Re: E-mail hacked..Now what?

Post by Sidney »

enderland wrote:What type of email account?

If it is a google, you can use a 2-step verification process which sends your phone a text message code prior to being able to login on a new machine.
Is this only for web mail? How would it work with an email client like Thunderbird?
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InvestorNewb
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Re: E-mail hacked..Now what?

Post by InvestorNewb »

enderland wrote:What type of email account?

If it is a google, you can use a 2-step verification process which sends your phone a text message code prior to being able to login on a new machine.
OP stated it was a Yahoo email account.
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Drain
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Re: E-mail hacked..Now what?

Post by Drain »

Yahoo has its own implementation of the same feature.
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Spiffs
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Re: E-mail hacked..Now what?

Post by Spiffs »

jimmy wrote:Anything else I need to do? Also how could this have happened and how can I prevent it from happening again. Thanks all..
Jimmy, yes, there are a number of things that you might want to do (like making sure you have an updated anti-virus program)--check out this step-by-step guide on "Understanding, Cleaning And Preventing Spyware" on the MajorGeeks forum.
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jimmy
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Re: E-mail hacked..Now what?

Post by jimmy »

Thanks everybody for all of the information. One more question regarding the e-mail and link that was sent to the recipients, which happened to be a link to a diet pill. Is there e-mail now compromised if they clicked on the link? Most people who have contacted me deleted it before opening but others went to the link..
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frugaltype
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Re: E-mail hacked..Now what?

Post by frugaltype »

jimmy wrote:Thanks everybody for all of the information. One more question regarding the e-mail and link that was sent to the recipients, which happened to be a link to a diet pill. Is there e-mail now compromised if they clicked on the link? Most people who have contacted me deleted it before opening but others went to the link..
I don't know. If I had clicked on a bogus link, I would run the free MalwareBytes Anti-Malware program.

Besides changing the password on your yahoo email account, check to see if they changed your reply to address. I sounds like they didn't if you're seeing bounced mail, but I would check everything there.
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Rosebud
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Re: E-mail hacked..Now what?

Post by Rosebud »

About a week ago, I started receiving pretty close to 100 or so returned e-mails, but when I looked at them none of them were to people who would have been in my address book. I had two accounts that were compromised by this, one at Earthlink and one at Yahoo. I talked to a service representative at EarthLink and he said that scammers will take e-mail addresses and try to figure out passwords and then they use those accounts to send out mass mailings that would otherwise be stopped by the filters that most accounts have. I tried to change my password and it didn't work for some reason, so he walked me through it to change in one place that was needed to send outgoing mail and then again for incoming mail. Then, I went to Yahoo and did the same thing. Haven't received another returned e-mail since then. I had a relatively simply three word (six letters together) password that was apparently easily hacked. Before this I hadn't really contemplated what someone would do with my e-mail account. Now I have far more secure passwords. On both EarthLink and Yahoo as I added the new passwords, there was an indication of how strong the password was and both listed the newer one as high strength level.
LifeIsGood
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Re: E-mail hacked..Now what?

Post by LifeIsGood »

I've had the same thing happen to my Yahoo email account twice. All it took was changing my Yahoo password.
jchef
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Re: E-mail hacked..Now what?

Post by jchef »

Drain wrote:Yahoo has its own implementation of the same feature.
The number of companies offering two factor authentication has started to grow quite large. Off the top of my I head I can think of:
  • Google
    Yahoo
    Hotmail/Outlook.com
    Facebook
    Twitter
    Dropbox
    Evernote
    LinkedIn
    Box

If you have an account with any of these that you use regularly, you probably want to give some thought to using two factor authentication.
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arthurdawg
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Re: E-mail hacked..Now what?

Post by arthurdawg »

My yahoo account (and lots of other yahoo accounts) have been "spoofed" lately. Apparently this involves an attach on the server, whereby they are able to find any email addresses into and out of your account going back however the server has stored them.

As far as I can tell (Yahoo has little to say on the matter - it apparently reflects their server security and they don't want to admit to any issues) this doesn't necessarily involve them breaking into the email account in question, rather they just hit the server. You see the emails in your account that bounce because the servers think you sent them when you didn't.

I went ahead and changed out passwords (I had 2 step authentication turned on already) just in case. No further issues so far.
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Novine
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Re: E-mail hacked..Now what?

Post by Novine »

Make sure to review your security questions and your secondary e-mail. I've seen those changed by hacks so that people change their password and then get it changed again by the hackers.
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Re: E-mail hacked..Now what?

Post by LadyGeek »

This thread is now in the Personal Consumer Issues forum (computer security).
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