Hacked Yahoo email

two friends hotmail accounts are currently spamming everyone.

I think they have trojan horses.

 

My hotmail password was changed again today, its the second time this has happened this month.

 

considering that hotmail email comes from and is stored on microsoft's servers, it is doubtful any of your friend's trojans has anything to do with it unless you mean they have keyloggers that took their hotmail passwords....then you could be correct.

to those who's web-based email accounts have been compromised, pick harder passwords for christ's sake....crackers are out there running brute force password crackers(they essentially run thru every word in their dictionaries to attempt to guess your passwords)...easy passwords get guessed easily...use a combination of upper and lower case and numbers or special characters in your passwords.

 

It may be a case of someone spoofing your email account so that it looks like it's coming from you...to trick them (the message receiver) into opening it. Your account may actually be ok. It could be someone else's computer system that is infected and has you as a contact...which is where the spoofer/hacker is getting your address to use.

 

If you can still get access to your account, change the password and see if that works. If you use a complicated enough password, you probably wont need to change it very often, but it is recommended that you change passwords on any protected account from time to time.

Also, to ensure that the source of your problem isnt on your end, run some scans to ensure that you dont have something on your machine that might capture your attempt to change your password.

 

Sounds like you've been spoofed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spoofing

 

perfectly reasonable answer


but


if the spam is going out to folks in your contacts list, it is unlikley that it is spoofed or coming from someone else's account....otherwise where would they get the info on your contacts to send to?

 

Just saw this response.

Obligatory:

This.


It's such a broad issue, it's hard to troubleshoot.

 

This happened recently to my yahoo email that I had for years. It's more of bots getting ahold of the contacts within your email address. I erased all of the contacts on that account and they no longer receive the spam emails from me. I also changed my password but I don't think that helps.

I still use the email for junk mail for that reason. Since you've already switched to gmail, delete all your contacts in the yahoo and you should be fine.

 

I've noticed this on hotmail. I fell for it the first time and opened it, even though it had Blank for the subject headline. Then I fell for it again, as the email had "Hey you" as the subject headline.

I had to do the system restore, but I think I'm good now.