My boy has had his email account hacked into and it looks to me like it was used to send out these advertisements for a Canadian 'Med' site...

I can't seem to find anything about it on the web. Well, not anything specific; and that will help.

Have any of you had this happen or better yet: Do any of you know what to do? So far I have had him change his password to a very hard and long one. We will see if that helps. My sis says it won't because it is some kind of web based virus or whatever. The last time 'he' sent out these emails to people in his address his computer wasn't even on! My sis claims you have to delete your account and open a new one to stop this. I think that is ridiculous and what would stop this from happening to your new account in just a few minutes.

Anyway, I was just looking for some info and ideas on what to do (If anything can be done!). I wonder if anyone has ever asked Yahoo about this and what the reply was.

 

the "From" of an email isn't actually sent from the server, its on the client side actually in the email. Anyone can end an email with any "from" address they want.

That being said, yahoo is easy to hack with a little info. But I'm 99% sure thats not your problem.

 

My boy is at work right now so I can't look at his account. He changed the password to a lot longer / harder one! If that is what happened; I don't think they will be back!

I understand how most of that works. There were emails in his inbox about this. Maybe most of them were failure notices from bad email addresses. I don't remember all of the specifics of those and the other things we saw in there. I thought he said his one 'box' was emptied completely. That would indicate to me that someone had gotten into his account. The other things could be spoofed and what not which means that someone maybe didn't get into his account.
One of the other things about this that bugs me is that the cc: part of these emails was to legitimate addresses from his account. To me that indicates also that someone had been in his account.

We were at a friends house for his younger brothers graduation party. We didn't get to spend much time looking at this so he logged in and changed some passwords to several things. Then he had to go to work. Before we left the party I got one of these emails from his younger brother. . . . So this just has me worried that all of us in this circle of email addresses might be getting ready to loose or have our accounts hacked too!

These bums need to be shot!! I'd do it. In fact, I'd even purchase, supply, and use the bullets necessary to get the job done.

 

The CC thing is weird and could be because it was hacked, although rejected addresses just bounce back to whatever address is in the "from" field. Change the secret questions for the "I lost my password" stuff. Also see if you can change DOB, although i doubt it. You need to make the answers to these Q's completely not true and hard to guess. Also change zip code if thats on yahoo.

I unfortunately have experience doing this back when i was a manipulative piece of **** with my girlfriend.

 

SPYWARE. All they have to do is get you to open one bad attachment that has there spyware encrypted into it and they have any info they want from your computer. All he had to do is sign into his account from any computer infected and they have his keystrokes on record. This is how they get into bank and credit card accounts also. The spyware records your visited URL's and all keystrokes on each one. Doesn't matter how tough your password is.

As far as an email being cleaned out, I found out the hard way that on most all of the free services like Yahoo, after 6 months of no signing in they clean the box out and basically put the account into a dead zone. I lost some years of emails from this issue myself. Don't know if this is applicable in this case or not.

 

Oh, I hear you... We have all done things in 'the past' . . . I think the thing that matters there is that we have 'learned' or changed our ways! Of course there is the 'Was it for a good reason' sentiment . . . LOL
I wish I had thought of changing that other stuff! Well, we will have to work on this. If someone got into the account we will see if Yahoo will do anything about it for us... I'm pretty sure they would not care a bit but I do hope I'm wrong! We will see what I can find out... Just seems strange I didn't really get any results from a few 'google' searches I did... I must not understand what I'm looking for just yet . . .

 

had it hacked a few times
first thing never click links in yahoo emails, they are usually a password stealing link
send one of the emails to yahoo tech support and they will tell ya what to do in a few days
contact freinds in email list telling them not to click any links in emails til you clear it up so they don`t have the same thing happen

 

best thing to do it when login onto a public computer that could be infected with something that watches keystrokes is to type ur pass wrong then click and delete the wrong letters

ex real pass is 34567890.

type 1234567890123

u know u need to delete the first 2 and the last 3
so u click before the 3 and backspace the 1 and 2 (the ones at the begining)
click after the 0 and delete the 123

so it will know u typed 1234567890123 and it will know u pressed delete 3 times and backspace 2 times but it wont know where

now this doesnt work on all of them bc some of them have the ability to register where the u place the mouse at but it can help prevent some of them from getting your info

 

This is good info guys!! Guess we should keep this coming for the benefit of us all!
I haven't had a problem like this in so long that I forgot about just hopping on any old computer and using it. If one is infected it would steal your info easily and you may not even think about it. We just got back from a 6 week 10,000 mile trip around this great country of ours and we used multiple different access points, different computers and what not. . . . Guess I can imagine what happened here . . .

With working extra hours and my boy working 12s we still haven't gotten together on this. I think that when we sit down together we can figure out what is really going on here. Right away he realized his bank account was tied to this email so he fixed that too. So far he hasn't had any more emails sent out from his account (Or at least with his as the 'from' on any more of these types of emails).

I would like to have a 'talk' with these trouble makers though I think we could come to an understanding!!