Someone's hacked my email - who can I report it to?

golfman

Morning gents,

I'm like a ****in bull today. I was sat here logged into my yahoo email and next thing I get 23 emails saying "mail delivery failure". Somehow some ****in company from China got into my email and sent my whole contact list this.....

"Heya,how are you doing recently ?
I would like to introduce you a very good company which i knew.Their website is http://www.shop-cargo.com .They can offer you all kinds of electronical products which you need like laptops ,gps ,TV LCD,cell phones,ps3,MP3/4,motorcycles etc........Please take some time to have a check ,there must be somethings you 'd like to purchase .
Their contact email: shopcargo@yahoo.com.cn. MSN: shopcargo2008@hotmail.com
Hope you have a good mood in shopping from their company !
Regards "

I've already spoken to yahoo via "live chat" who gave me a number to call that doesn't work from Ireland...so now they've given me a form to fill in. I went on the website, found the phone number and called it but the little bastard hung up on me when I started asking questions. Now he won't answer the phone.

Is there any consumer body or internet police I can report this to? I'm ****in raging that that could happen while I was actually on my computer! GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

AARRRGH

They didn't hack your e-mail; they simply used your e-mail address in the "reply to:" field of their spam.

It happens all the time.

On the slight chance that they did hack your e-mail account (which I don't believe is the case - why would they bother going through the trouble of hacking your e-mail account when they can create a new yahoo e-mail account in about 5 seconds?) there is very little you can do about it. Are the Gardai really going to waste time investigating this? I don't think so.

macrubicon

The chances that your account has been compromised are quite low.

What has more likely happened is that someone is spoofing your address - sending spam E-Mails out from their system with your address as the sender. ( Google up address harvesting )

Happens a lot and there is feck all you can do about it.

kmick

Change your password to something good and move on with your life.
http://netsecurity.about.com/cs/generalsecurity/a/aa112103b.htm
Would have been worse if they had sent something nasty and not just spam.

BuddhaJoe

Just to warn you, I have come across this before and if its anything like the previous examples I have seen it would appear your computer is infected with a trojan that logs keystrokes. The trojan then trawls through the log files and whenever it comes across a typical email login pattern it will record the email address and password. Then a bot will log in to the email account and send these spam messages to all contacts in the address book.

As for reporting it, im not aware of any organization you can report it to.

golfman

AARRRGH wrote: »

They didn't hack your e-mail; they simply used your e-mail address in the "reply to:" field of their spam.

It happens all the time.

On the slight chance that they did hack your e-mail account (which I don't believe is the case - why would they bother going through the trouble of hacking your e-mail account when they can create a new yahoo e-mail account in about 5 seconds?) there is very little you can do about it. Are the Gardai really going to waste time investigating this? I don't think so.

I can see the emails in my sent items? Surely that means they were in my email????

Cabaal

golfman wrote: »

I can see the emails in my sent items? Surely that means they were in my email????

It would suggest they were sent from your account then and not spoofing as has been suggested

golfman

Cabaal wrote: »

It would suggest they were sent from your account then and not spoofing as has been suggested

I have been sat at my computer all morning so it wasn't done from here...

Paulw

golfman wrote: »

I have been sat at my computer all morning so it wasn't done from here...

They don't need physical access to your PC at all.

Get a good anti-virus on your PC (AVG is free and good), get a good firewall (zonealarm works well), and scan your PC for trojans and keyloggers.

Once you've done that, change all your passwords.

There's no one really you can report it to, unfortunately (besides Yahoo).

AARRRGH

golfman wrote: »

I have been sat at my computer all morning so it wasn't done from here...

If they are in your sent items they are real spam.

Your yahoo account is not on your computer - your yahoo account is on a server in the US somewhere.

The hacker doesn't need access to your computer to access your yahoo account - for example, I could guess your password and access your yahoo account from my office.

The best (and only) thing to do is to do a full virus scan and change your yahoo password to something difficult. Note you may have been tricked into giving out your yahoo password in the past - for example, if you signed up for an account at some website and used your yahoo e-mail address and the same password as your yahoo account. Or if you gave the answer to your "secret question" on one of those stupid "what's your porn name" tricks (where you give out your pets name and your mothers maiden name.)

macrubicon

golfman wrote: »

I can see the emails in my sent items? Surely that means they were in my email????

Cabaal wrote: »

It would suggest they were sent from your account then and not spoofing as has been suggested

Sorry - did not catch that bit from your OP. +1 for Cabaal

In that case your account has been used - change your password and move on I'm afraid.

You may have left behind a logged in session or a browser that remembers passwords somewhere etc.

golfman

Paulw wrote: »

They don't need physical access to your PC at all.

Get a good anti-virus on your PC (AVG is free and good), get a good firewall (zonealarm works well), and scan your PC for trojans and keyloggers.

Once you've done that, change all your passwords.

There's no one really you can report it to, unfortunately (besides Yahoo).

Thanks for that, I already have AVG free but thats all at the moment. I'll check out zonealarm. Is there anything else you guys would reccomend I should have on my computer?

Cabaal

Install and update antivirus program, spyware program and scan your whole PC, also make sure your windows installation is uptodate using the windows update feature and change your yahoo password to a hard to guess one and if you have any easy yahoo security question change this also #

dudara

Moved to Technology > Security.

Apologies Mods, if not the right place.

dudara