Someone please explain this too me.

I have a very old dormant email account with yahoo. This is an account I haven't been to in Lord knows how long. I just received a phone call from my brother about an email he got this morning at 5 am from that account.

How can that happen? No other account has been compromised so why all of a sudden this long dormant account going active.

it's one of the many mysteries of the intertubes. . .

Winter Woman said:

I have a very old dormant email account with yahoo. This is an account I haven't been to in Lord knows how long. I just received a phone call from my brother about an email he got this morning at 5 am from that account.

How can that happen? No other account has been compromised so why all of a sudden this long dormant account going active.

Click to expand...

It's called spoofing, someone is spoofing your acct, probably to send SPAM. They really probably don't have access to the account.

Lay off the Ambien. You're emailing people while you're sleeping.





lol, j/k!

Yeah, what golddog said, it's email spoofing, here is a link to tell you what it is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_spoofing

Never heard of spoofing before. It makes sense. I have run every anti-virus, malware, spyware, younameitware and it always came up clean.

Thanks for the link I'm sending my brother the link to that. One good thing was it did send him porn.

lots of accounts get cracked, my son's got hit they just sent out crap suggesting to visit this place or that bla bla, 2 friends had the same thing happen.

Winter Woman said:

Never heard of spoofing before. It makes sense. I have run every anti-virus, malware, spyware, younameitware and it always came up clean.

Thanks for the link I'm sending my brother the link to that. One good thing was it did send him porn.

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WW while it could be spoofing it could be someone managed to crack the account without looking at the actual header you can't tell. To make sure it's ok just go change the password to a random mix of numbers and characters and use at least 8 characters.

curious2garden said:

WW while it could be spoofing it could be someone managed to crack the account without looking at the actual header you can't tell. To make sure it's ok just go change the password to a random mix of numbers and characters and use at least 8 characters.

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I changed passwords just in case.

I backed up to my external hard drive about 10 days ago. If I back up now will the virus be transfered into the external drive.

Winter Woman said:

I backed up to my external hard drive about 10 days ago. If I back up now will the virus be transferred into the external drive.

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Well, there is a chance your computer may not be infected, Esspecially since you said you haven't logged into it in a long time... which means they would have had to get access to your account with another means.

Something similar happened to me, my old yahoo email that I haven't logged into in over 2 years started sending my main email scam. I put a stop to it real quick by changing my password.

Im my situation my virus or other security threat being on my computer was not the cause.

(alot of scammers will hack smaller sites that dont require a lot of security and they try to use the emails and passwords they get on a lot of email sites and other important things. Sadly, this works a lot because a most people use the same email and password for everything.)



TO BE SAFE:
Back up all your data and download the free version of Malwarebytes from Cnet or something like that and then scan the entire drive.
Then restart your computer in safe mode with networking, and run the same program but scan the computer this time.

Malwarebytes is the same program that most of those bigbox stores use for their virus removal service.

ALSO: Make sure you have an antivirus program... malwarebytes is good but the free version doesnt have much in the way of real time protection with firewalls and whatnot


the best of luck to ya!

technical anomaly - ya

i just had this happen to me with a REALLY old aol account that i only check for shits and giggles. they spammed the fuck out of my address book. they actually sent porn spam to my previous employer, which i can only hope was intercepted by their spam blocker. my sent mailbox was full. i changed the password and it stopped.

Thanks for all the advice everyone. I'm on it like white on rice. I guess I should take some classes from Adult Ed on hardware/software.

Wish I was a whiz kid in this generation.

Winter Woman said:

I backed up to my external hard drive about 10 days ago. If I back up now will the virus be transfered into the external drive.

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Well that's just it I don't think you have a virus. Usually these type of exploits occur off your computer however it could be malware. Just in case go here and run their free virus scan:
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ make sure you choose 32 bit or 64 bit depending on your Windows OS. Run the full scan of your computer. I'm assuming you are on Windows 7, Vista or XP. If you aren't PM me and tell me your OS, and I'll tell you how can do this on that OS.

Also if your running IE change to Firefox or Sea Monkey and add NoScript (http://noscript.net), it prevents sites from foisting downloads on you that you are unaware you are getting as you browse online. Oh and it's free. But you are right you should be running a virus scan routinely before backing. Infected, corrupted or otherwise damaged backups are a very frustrating thing to find. So many people think just the act of backing makes them safe. Nope every once in awhile you need to test your backups to see if they can restore.

I have NoScripts that did stop a lot of things. Now when I run a scan it doesn't find nearly the same about of garbage.

I use FoxFire and Opera. I have never heard of Sea Monkey. I think I check that one out. I'll run the trendmicro too. Thanks, I love free things.

Same thing happened to me. MSN shut down my account before I had the chance to change my email on alot of things I'd signed up to, so I couldn't even do a password change/recovery as the account was deemed to hazardous to recover/let me prove it was mine to pair it with my new gmail etc... Eh...