How was my gmail hacked?

Trotter

I just got a mail from my second gmail address with the following as the title..

HI, my dear friend .There have a good news !


It was sent to all of the contacts for that mail, luckily only 20 ish, but I have no idea how the password got out. Its letters and numbers mixed up and I've never given it to anyone or typed it into the net.

I've deleted the contacts from the account and changed my passwords on all my accounts.

Is there anything else I should do?

Thanks!

Chardee MacDennis

Trotter wrote: »

I just got a mail from my second gmail address with the following as the title..

HI, my dear friend .There have a good news !


It was sent to all of the contacts for that mail, luckily only 20 ish, but I have no idea how the password got out. Its letters and numbers mixed up and I've never given it to anyone or typed it into the net.

I've deleted the contacts from the account and changed my passwords on all my accounts.

Is there anything else I should do?

Thanks!

same happened to me this morning. must be a site we both signed up for recently...

if you log into gmail and go to the bottom of the page there is a line with last account activity, click the details you should be able to see what ip address logged in and through what medium (IMAP or broswer etc) then make sure to end all current sessions.

goodlad

It could be possible that you have a keylogger on your pc?

Give your machine a good scanning and see if anything turns up.

Mr. Presentable

Do you access it ever from a shared PC?

Trotter

goodlad wrote: »

It could be possible that you have a keylogger on your pc?

Give your machine a good scanning and see if anything turns up.

I have AVG, Spybot, Ad-aware and Windows Defender.

Anything else I need to get?

I just noticed too that the mail isnt listed in the sent items of the account.. I'm not sure if that makes any difference though.

nipplenuts wrote: »

Do you access it ever from a shared PC?

No, I'm fairly careful usually with stuff like that.

Random

I've seen this happen to a few people I know lately and each one says they didn't enter their details anywhere else. Very strange. If anyone has any more theorys please post it

Trotter

What I did do that was a bit idiotic considering.. was put my gmail and my password into the twitter network to see if any of my contacts were on it.

I swiftly deleted my twitter account within minutes of setting it up because I didnt think it was much good. When I searched the net with the subject of the mail in inverted commas, I found a couple of people who had mentioned on this twitter site that the same had happened them within hours of it happening to me.

Maybe Im way off the mark, maybe Im not. Putting my gmail address and password into that was in hindsight a silly thing to do.

I just got this email from my sister. Didn't open it as I knew she wouldn't use bad english like that.

What would happen if i opened the e-mail?

Trotter

Deleted User wrote: »

I just got this email from my sister. Didn't open it as I knew she wouldn't use bad english like that.

What would happen if i opened the e-mail?

Could you do me a favour and ask her did she register for twitter recently? As in did she put her mail address and password in to scan her contacts for members?

I just deleted the mail. She may not know it happened though so I'd tell her if I was you.



A question in general to everyone.. why does it seem to be only Irish people effected by this particular email?

clutchy08

Some keyloggers a undetected

or just go to telnet and look for odd connections

Shane O' Malley

Happening to someone i know about 2 months ago.

She did not know until i spotted that mail from her was going into my spam folder on our company network. (Her address was being publicly blocked)

She is not sure how it happened but she did use a shared computer.

The account also had a auto responder on it advertising some crap.

Black Swan

Were you using a wifi router or at a hotspot with wifi? If so, someone might have been packet sniffing with Netstumbler or Wireshark, along with a programme to read your hash.

DesignLady

This has started happening with my hotmail account recently. Deleted all contacts (very embarrasing as my old college tutor seems to have got some spam from me) and changed the password.

Fortunately this is not my primary address or the one I use for business but I have had it for 10 years so I'm reluctant to delete is as it is still a point of contact for some people.

However it's not just my contacts who recieved spam. Random people have been sent spam from my address. I realised something was wrong when I was constantly getting mail can't be delivered messages from hotmail. Grrr.

This is the email I use to sign up to things and signed up with twitter last year (but deleted my account a few months later). Wonder if that is it?

clutchy08

Yes there are ways to get in to msn ect ect

1 Guessing Passwords from there secret question
2 Getting Brute Forced
3 Keylogged
4 Or the most famous way is to social Engineer a person
5 Phishing

conor-mr2

IF you sign up with your email account to anything, there is the inherent risk that the company/item you just signed up to will have that address database compromised/sold on/stolen and then used by spammers to send emails.

gerryk

You don't need someone's password to make it appear than an email was sent by them... from and reply-to spoofing is all that's needed.

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

That having been said... don't give your password to a 3rd party.

Nehaxak

What Gerryk said.

Probably nothing at all to do with you getting a virus or otherwise. Just some spamming arse faking your email addresses to make it *look* like the emaisl came from you when in fact they didn't.

Show the header information from the original email and you can track back even by just looking through it to find out exactly where is was sent from and from which service - usually an unprotected open relay SMTP server.

JimmyCrackCorn!

Possibilities

• Cross site request forgery (Do you leave Gmail logged in all the time)
• Malware
• Logged in on a public PC
• Used from an internt cafe where a sniffer was active (unlikely)
• Unknown exploit (I doubt it)

barnicles

Search in computers&technology. An application has recently been released that can read your password when it is being transferred from Google servers to your computer. To avoid this go into settings and tick Always use https
Hope that helps
Barnicles