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Author Topic: Do you think my email has been hacked into?  (Read 2461 times)

geep

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Do you think my email has been hacked into?
« on: March 17, 2014, 01:49:12 PM »

Hi,
Was just looking at one of my email accounts that I don't use very often, and noticed that I've got hundreds of "Mail delivery failure..." type messages dated 6 Mar 2014 from email addresses I've never heard of.

Haven't noticed anything else bad about the email account, but have changed the password.

Do you think somebody has broken in to the account?
Or is it somebody pretending to be me who has sent the emails? If so, why?

Cheers,
Peter
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roseway

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Re: Do you think my email has been hacked into?
« Reply #1 on: March 17, 2014, 02:24:47 PM »

I get those too, but my mail provider blocks them because they have viruses attached. They are sent to <every name under the sun>@my domain, and they're obviously malicious.
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  Eric

kitz

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Re: Do you think my email has been hacked into?
« Reply #2 on: March 17, 2014, 02:55:44 PM »

Ive been getting an awful lot of these too over the past few months. 

Quote
They are sent to <every name under the sun>@my domain, and they're obviously malicious

In my case its where someone has attempted to spoof my email address to send malicious mail to somewhere else.  When they fail they end up bouncing back to me - even though I never actually sent them. 

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Historically this type of spam usually starts not by you having a virus, but someone who has your email address in their records getting a virus.  These type of viruses have an SMTP engine, that specifically look on an infected machine for email addresses.    The typical way it may picks up email addresses is by scanning any mail on the system and looking for new addresses in the CC field.  From the smtp engine it then sends out a zillion further emails spoofing the chosen email address.   


This is why I am so against people using CC when they send out joke type emails to everyone on their friends list.   A friend of a friend is the likely culprit who has the virus, but the virus uses your email address  simply because your friend has used the CC field which displays your email address to all and sundry. 

The newer type smtp viruses go one step further and will also dictionary spoof the first part of a domain.   

Its a big rant of mine.   
1) Dont use CC (use BCC)
2) Dont bounce mail - it never to goes back to the right place & some innocent sod usually gets it.
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Ronski

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Re: Do you think my email has been hacked into?
« Reply #3 on: March 17, 2014, 03:44:07 PM »

I've also seen a big increase in these bounce back emails to, unfortunately not a lot that can be done about it. Hopefully they'll move on to using somebody else's email address soon.
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broadstairs

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Re: Do you think my email has been hacked into?
« Reply #4 on: March 17, 2014, 05:20:25 PM »

I used to see a lot of these bounce messages because someone was spoofing my address but these days I see very few. The main problem at present is spam with Cyrillic text, I'm getting some 20+ per day right now.

Stuart
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