Email was hacked...

[hdansjr]

My wife uses Hotmail for email. Yesterday when i checked my work email, i saw an e-mail from her. Turned out that it was an email that contained two links to porn/viagra sites. All of her contacts recieved emails from her account while our computers were asleep during the night before.

I have ran Microsoft Security Esentials, Malwarebytes, and SpyBot Search and Destory, just to check for viruses/malware on our computer. All scans came up clean. However, my wife is still freaking out stating she's not going to use that computer and she feels violated.

My question is, for my wife to see people's responses, could this have happend because someone "got" her address, and used a program to figure out her password(which was two very common words seperated by the number 4 for a total of 8 characters), and not a piece of malware/trojan/virus on our computer? She enters various truly legit contests that ask for her e-mail address, and I think someone grabbed her email address at that point. Maybe i'm the one being niave....

 

[Slaymate]

Go to Syware-Asylum, select your operating system, select Full scan and follow the instructions carefully.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

It is easy to spoof an email address.....

 

[hdansjr]

I thought that it might have been a spoof return email address just used, but when i logged into her account all the sent messages were in the sent folder. I will try that website when i get home to see what it shows me.

 

[heister]

Change the password?

 

[Sheepykins]

spoofed passwords are easy, also if she uses a site that has been compromised and she uses the same passwords on everything she uses - also bad.

And i know from experience many suspec websites contain hidden keyloggers which quite alot of malware programs have trouble finding. an intrusive program could have almost certainly taken place im afraid to say

- we all get them from time to time, it happens... some websites are just looking to ruin a persons day and the key is to be smart about it because you cant avoid it and if your wife is throwing in the towel now then she may as well sell her computer lol because it could certainly happen again, more so with home users like her

 

[KSoD]

spoofed passwords are easy, also if she uses a site that has been compromised and she uses the same passwords on everything she uses - also bad.

And i know from experience many suspec websites contain hidden keyloggers which quite alot of malware programs have trouble finding. an intrusive program could have almost certainly taken place im afraid to say

- we all get them from time to time, it happens... some websites are just looking to ruin a persons day and the key is to be smart about it because you cant avoid it and if your wife is throwing in the towel now then she may as well sell her computer lol because it could certainly happen again, more so with home users like her

Okay couple things.

A.) It is highly unlikely that Hotmail's website itself was compromised. So the first statement that the site being compromised and everything got stolen is incorrect. Hotmail is operated by Microsoft. Do you really think that if the site was compromised and that such information was able to be obtained from 1 user that it wouldn't affect billions more that use that website daily and make international news? Exactly. It was not a site compromise issue.

B.) Going inline with said above, no hidden keyloggers. So out of the question.

So this only leaves her PC being compromised, not the site itself. The fact of the matter is that an infected email was opened. Which caused this problem. It doesnt even have to be her entire PC. All it has to be is 1 email.

So lets clear this up real fast and make some facts out of the fairy tales stated here.

1.) Hotmail was not compromised. If it was, my email account also would have been hacked. Guess what, it wasnt. Nor was Steve Balmers or the 60,000+ that work at Microsoft or the billions of others that use Hotmail.

2.) NEVER, and I seriously and honestly mean NEVER, open any email if you do not know the sender.

2A.) Even if you do know the sender, NEVER open any emails from them that you didnt ask for. At least not until after you call them, text them or send them a message on their favorite social website asking if they sent it. The time spent doing this will save you in the end from messages that are opened by them that are infected and then sent out to all the people in their contact list. There is nothing wrong with waiting a couple of hours to get and answer if the email was sent by them if it saves you days of work trying to clean your PC of an infection.

3.) Simply put, if you get an email from any site that you normally visit, make sure the link you follow goes TO that website directly. Meaning if EBay sends you an email saying you need to login and change something, the link should only be to http://www.ebay.com/ and nothing more. No reputable site would ever use any 3rd party sites to control their emails or information.

If something like the above happens to you, make sure you go directly to the website in question and change your password on the account ASAP. If at all possible use a different PC than the one you used to access that account before the incident. To ensure that it isnt the PC infected. 95% of the time, it is just an infected email not that your account is hacked. It is just basically an automatic chain letter. Changing your password will instantly break this cycle.

 

[Sheepykins]

I was generalising, i wasnt suggesting hotmail was the cause but lets face it - if his wife googles a website in the course of browsing about anything that turns out to be dodgy then yeah keylogger city.

and once they have your password they'll try to re-trace your steps and take any account they deem worthy, in this case email account for phishing, and yeah it most likely was an email she clicked on and read or maybe she uses msn and some random botter or someone else with a bad account sent her one of those
"HEY, I FOUND PICS OF YOU, CLICK ON DIS"

you'd better believe the people who keylogged the warcraft site i went on and stole my password also tried to use the same one for my aion account.