Gmail hacked. Possible Trojan or similar?

Miguel_Sanchez

Hi. My gmail account got hacked today and spam sent to every last person I know.

I changed my password immediately and checked the IP address that had accessed my account. It was somewhere in China.

But I don't know how they got my password. Ran AVG and it came up with nothing. I haven't downloaded anything odd or dodgy on my system and am very careful about where I use my email address. My password also was of pretty good strength.

Anyone any ideas how someone would have gone about finding out my password and accessing my account? Could there be a trojan or similar on my computer that enabled them to get my password?

Hellm0

Did you use a strong password? Have you used the same email/password for other sites?

milltown

Same thing happened me in the past hour. Pain in the arris. Most likely cause is as Hellm0 says, a lapse in concentration and using the same/similar username or password to sign up to another site. I don't use internet cafés and I'm in work today in one of the biggest IT companies in the world, behind probably millions of dollars worth of security and an army of admins. I can't see it being a trojan or virus. Just good old social engineering/ human error, call it what you will.

south

yeah same here

south

would logging into facebook or other sites and looking for friends have something to do with this?

xprepairs

One of the sites you went to while surfing the net may have installed a keylogger on your PC.

jos22

ya mine and a friend also got hacked from a china based IP
same thing emailed some crapped about an electronic store to entire address book.
this seems to have happen to quit a lot of people from the start of September all reporting the same or similar story

see here on google fourm more people same issue
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=4c0d826d13190720&hl=en&fid=4c0d826d13190720000474e2a86f0e4c

thebman

Same happened to me. I don't think its a virus. I think someone found an exploit in googles contact scanner TBH and a certain number of people were effected by this.

I suspect this because my anti-virus is up to date, I don't go to dodgy sites (same 5 sites a day or so), I don't have any viruses on my machine and I use Opera browser which I would imagine has lower number of exploits for it.

Another reason I suspect it is a google exploit and not my computer is that after it emailed everyone in my address book of which there were loads of google and non-google email addresses, a few other gmail users that got the email on my contacts list were also emailing the same thing to all their contacts.

The email itself contains no attachment or anything like that so I don't think it would be the attachment. Only a link in the email that links to a site that does integrate with some of googles other services, I didn't pay attention to which but it has google branding on it although it could be part of the scam they have going.

Its unlikely that all the people who emailed me would be infected as they all work in IT and have an insane amount of computer knowledge between them.

jos22

Mary Landesman, a senior security researcher at San Francisco-based ScanSafe, said it's more likely that the massive lists -- which include approximately 30,000 credentials from Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and other sources -- were harvested by botnets that infected PCs with keylogging or data stealing Trojan horses.

I find this to be more accurate than the bull story about phishing scam MS and google are calling it

link
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139098/Researcher_refutes_Microsoft_s_account_of_hijacked_Hotmail_passwords?taxonomyId=82

madmoe

I had Gmail account hacked by a spammer yesterday and its now disabled :-( I hope to hell they re-enable it. This is the second time in less than a month that it was taken over and used to send spam!!!

Anyone know any Google poster's here on boards.ie that I could ask? I done nothing wrong and did not violate Google's terms and service.

Cheers,
M