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my email got spammed and sent emails to ALL my contacts. i started mcaffee security scan and sent an email to all my contacts saying sorry and dont open the previous email, and i changed my password. i also changed the password on my other email addresses just in case now what? is my email safe to use again?
Your email should be ok to use again. Change the password for any websites for which you use the same password. Never, ever, give your password or information a website that you are not 100% sure that you can trust. Many emails can contain a link to a carbon copy of a real website, for example paypal, of course asking you to sign in with your sensitive information.
You should educate yourself on how to stop viruses and worms from taking over your computer. Also, you may want to learn how to tell when an email from a friend is from a hacked account.
Some other tips to include- don’t sign up for any random websites. If you’d like to, then make a separate email account for spam.
Start looking for new friends.
Was the spam about you being stuck in London without money?
Or was it you promoting a product?
yentingyenta – I swear it wasn’t me!
Seriously though, I have received about 4 or 5 of those from friends who got hacked. The email said something like, “Hey, check out this cool website”. I was stupid enough to click on it that first time and now I get HUNDREDS of spam emails directly into my inbox. If that is what your friends got, it may just be that, and not something harmful. Majorly annoying, but it was my fault for clicking the link (only once).
How did you check your activity? I have 4 or 5 accounts for different work stuff and only my personal one got spammed. I assume it was because that was the address my friend had.
oops, doublepostitis strikes again! Almost
Syag: Where?
RGB™, what is your fascination with doublepostitis??
SiDi™
Moski – Have no fear, I caught it JUST IN TIME!! My phone sometimes sends the post twice but this time I saw it happen and I took action. I pressed edit on the second post and wrote something else in it’s place. I have found the cure!!!
Hurray Dr. Syag!!!
doublepostitis:
Make sure you have strong passwords and “security questions”. Sometimes the hackers will get back in even after you change your password by using the “forgot password” link and then “guessing the answer to your security questions. The answers to those questions are often easy to figure out using the emails they already got from you and Google searches. Whenever choosing these questions think about how easy/hard it would be for a hacker to use them against you. I will often use a non-standard answers for these things such as using some random name for “who was your first grade teacher” or “what is your mothers maiden name”. The risk is that you will end up locking yourself out if you ever forget but as long as you know what your answers are you are ok.
Mod42: Many sites allow you to choose your own security question.
Here’s something I posted in the past, but it’s something people should really understand.
A website often has subdomains. A subdomain means that it is really just like another folder on the site but instead of google.com/search it would be in the form of images.google.com. The address of the site is the last part, “google.com”.
Often, a spam email will tell you to log in to your PayPal account by clicking on a link. Always look at the link. If it is from payPal it would say paypal.com. If it is a fake it would say, paypal.jkygt.com. Remember, the site is jkygt.com, and they made themselves a folder called paypal.
Even when the link in the email says paypal.com it could still be that it is only the text of the link, while the underlying link is somewhere else. So, to see what the link is, either right-click and copy link or mouse over and look at the bottom.
Another thing is that you look at the email headers. Any large enough company will have its email coming from its own server, and not some obscure server in Vietnam.
If you have been getting constant spam from a certain site you should configure a folder in your account and set “rules” so that all email from this source goes into this folder. This option is buried underneath vast amounts of settings on most emails, though. I have at least four of these folders.
What HaLeiVi makes a lot of sense!
See that link? Click it. Does it go to http://www.theyeshivaworld.com? Not very hard!! BE CAREFUL!
CONSTANT VIGILANCE!
Yahoo Breach Extends Beyond Yahoo to Gmail, Hotmail, AOL Users
(Thursday, July 12th, 2012)
Yahoo confirmed Thursday that a file containing approximately 400,000 usernames and passwords to Yahoo and other companies was stolen Wednesday. A group of hackers, known as the D33D Company, posted usernames and passwords for what appeared to be 453,492 accounts belonging to Yahoo, but also Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, Comcast, MSN, SBC Global, Verizon, BellSouth and Live.com users.
The hackers wrote a brief footnote to the data dump, which has since been pulled offline:
The hackers claimed to have stolen the passwords using a hacking technique called an SQL injection, which exploits a software vulnerability.
The breach comes just one month after LinkedIn, the online social network for professionals, had millions of user passwords exposed after hackers breached its systems. The breaches highlight the ease with which hackers are able to infiltrate systems, even at some of the most widely-used and sophisticated technology companies.
Security researchers at Rapid7, a security company, analyzed the dumped account information and found that it included account information not just for Yahoo users but for Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, Comcast, MSN, SBC Global, Verizon, BellSouth and Live.com users. Marcus Carey, a researcher at Rapid7, found that among the data were some 106,000 Gmail accounts, 55,000 Hotmail accounts and 25,000 AOL accounts.
Yahoo users should also consider changing their passwords to other sites for which they might have used the same password, as hackers tend to test those passwords across multiple sites.
(Source: NY Times)
Emphasis added by SiDi™
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