Email spam

[jttheclockman]

Someone informed me today that an email was sent from my address to various people. It was not me I did not send emails out to anyone so please delete and do not open. Why does these things happen?? How do I clean this up now??? I just don't have the time for this stuff right now:frown:

Thanks

 

[PenMan1]

Jt:
It sounds like your e-mail account got hacked. The first thing to do is go into the account and change your password. Sometimes just changing the password on the e-mail account to end the issue. Sometimes it gets more involved.

Additionally, I would run a complete virus scan on the computer to make sure that you haven't picked up a Trojan, bot, Etc.

Good luck. Just curious, who is your e-mail provider? My provider was one of those who got "compromised", only it happened two weeks before they claimed it.

 

[PenMan1]

Also, I will never again store even e-mail passwords on the computer. It only takes a few seconds to type it in, and stored passwords are much easier to steal.

 

[TomW]

Many times mischievous people will put the wrong email address on the "reply to" field in the email. Are you sure it was actually sent from your account? You can tell by looking at the full header of the sent email.
Tom

 

[Rob73]

If you store passwords you should use a program like lastpass which encrypts everything. It's always good to have an antivirus with email protection, and malware protection. AVG free is more than adequate for this purpose.

Another thing to consider is no one may have 'hacked' your account. The hacking term is used to loosely these days. 98% of the time if someone has had their logins compromised it's their own fault. Someone may simply just be 'spoofing' your email to use in their spam emails. This is very common. To put it simply it just means they are altering the email headers to make it appear that you are sending the email. It happens quite often and there is pretty much nothing you can do about it.

Unfortunately I just cleared my spam folder out and have no examples I can show you of an email header that's been spoofed. You might be able to find one on google though and have the person saying they getting mail from you forward the spam to you then you can take a look at the headers and see if you beings spoofed.

 

[srf1114]

It is relatively easy to spoof a reply to address on most email clients. The reply to address is not a computer generated field. it is a field that is entered in by the user. Malicous users can enter any data they want.

As was mentioned the only simple way to determine if the email really came from your account would be to use the information in the header to trace the true origins of the email. For example, If you use Yahoo for email and it list something else as the originating server, then it didn't come from your account. Of course if the malicious sender used some other yahoo account to spoof your reply address this wouldn't be of much help to you. In which case you would need to talk to yahoo to determine the real sender.

 

[Fred]

I got in the habit about ten years ago of signing the subject line with "... Fred".

I also advised everyone on my e-mail list that if they do not see the "... Fred" that I probably did not send the e-mail and I recommend them to delete the e-mail immediately.

SO far this has worked great for me and all I correspond with.

 

[jttheclockman]

If you store passwords you should use a program like lastpass which encrypts everything. It's always good to have an antivirus with email protection, and malware protection. AVG free is more than adequate for this purpose.

Another thing to consider is no one may have 'hacked' your account. The hacking term is used to loosely these days. 98% of the time if someone has had their logins compromised it's their own fault. Someone may simply just be 'spoofing' your email to use in their spam emails. This is very common. To put it simply it just means they are altering the email headers to make it appear that you are sending the email. It happens quite often and there is pretty much nothing you can do about it.

Unfortunately I just cleared my spam folder out and have no examples I can show you of an email header that's been spoofed. You might be able to find one on google though and have the person saying they getting mail from you forward the spam to you then you can take a look at the headers and see if you beings spoofed.

I too cleared my email and spam folders. I did not get a chance to look the email over because I was afraid to reopen it. I did notice that my AVG security was not active for 8 days which was the time my Mom took her fall and I was away from the computer most of the time. I never ever disengage it so I do not know what happened. How this could have been disabled is beyond me. I have since reactivated it and ran some scans and came up with nothing. I will watch this for a few days.

Just got home and the scan automatically went into action and again nothing on it. Hopefully this was a one time thing and hopefully no harm was done to anyone due to this. I too always sign my emails with my name.