Email problem

[Dizzydiza]

I have just received an email from one customer which is address to another of my customers. The customer who has sent the email has sent me several spam type emails. I have spoken to this customer and she says that several of her friends have also complained about spam like emails from her. They are full of rubbish and definitely not sent by her. I suspect her account has been hacked or some kind of programme on her computer sending out these emails. But now it seems that it has got hold of my contact list and as I said I have received an email which is address to a new customer of mine. I have Avast on my computer so I am disappointed that its not found any thing on my computer which may have caused this. Any suggestions on what I can do. I can copy and paste the message source if that is useful in seeing what's going on with it, although I would prefer it not to be in the public section of this forum
Thanks for any advice
Diana

 

[LumleyMedia]

Hi Diana,

Copy and paste it into a private message.

It seems you have been infected with malware or spyware to be honest.

Thanks

Alan

 

[Mike Lewis]

Is your friend's email account with a web-based service (like Hotmail or Gmail),or is it POP3 (using a program like Outlook or Thunderbird to download the messages to your computer)?

There's an important difference. With a web-based service, the contact list is held on the vendor's server. Any malware would have to get into the server to get the contacts, in which case your own anti-virus software is not going to help. In fact, there was a recent case of Hotmail being hacked in this way. I saw a lot of spam for a few weeks, apparently from people I know, arriving via Hotmail.

If your friend is using an email client, like Outlook, to store the contact list, then it's more likely that there is malware on your friend's computer - and perhaps on your own. If Avast didn't find it, try one or two other AV programs (but not at the same time).

Mike

 

[Dizzydiza]

Hi sorry I missed your replies but its been hectic here and I haven't been on my laptop as much as I can. Its a hotmail account that this 1st customer has used and its Thunderbird I have used to download the email. The 2nd customer is not known to my 1st customer yet this email is from 1st to the 2nd but is in my email inbox. I dont actually know if the 2nd customer received the same email or not. Hope that make sense.

 

[BioOutsource]

I have also faced similar issues, and received spam mails from friend's free accounts like hotmail or yahoo, with no knowledge themselves. Same problem have been identified in Facebook. As far as i know it is some sort of comptuer/cyber virus that gets into your email when you log-in and automatically email a specific Subject and content to all contacts saved in that email. I'm still finding a cure for this issue, if you come across any please do share.

 

[aviemorebusiness]

Having been 'attacked' myself with this type of spam - in particular my personal Hotmail account - as soon as you are alerted to this problem and it seems like it is you that is sending the mail, go in and change your password immediately. This tends to cure the problem, however, it does mean that you have upset all your friends by sending out a spam email. But you can always go and apologise to them! If you get spam from your friends accounts, tell them as soon as you can and tell them to go and change their password. These spammers will continue to access your account if they can so dont let them have unrestricted access by doing nothing. Hope that helps.

 

[Dizzydiza]

Hi thanks for the reply. I did tell them but I am still getting the emails. It seems that they are reluctant to change their password

 

[Scottish Business Owner]

Diana,

My hotmail was attached recently and I had lots of my friends telling me they were getting spam. Microsoft didn't want to know so I deleted the account. From my experience these issues tend to happen alot more with Hotmail than anyone else. For me Hotmail has had it's day and things like gmail are just far superior solutions.

 

[Image42]

I remember hearing about this happening a while ago and the advice was to change the password straight away and to change it on a regular basis. Fortunately it hasn't to me (yet!). I've stopped using Hotmail and Yahoo! anyway because of the amount of spamming to those accounts. If I believed all the emails in my Yahoo! account I'd be a billionaire by now.

 

[LewisBassett]

This sounds like a case of spoofing - which has nothing to do with accounts being hacked, or passwords being compromised.

In real life, someone could send a letter to some random businesses and write loads of nasty things, signed with your name. They could pretend to be you, and most people would not tell the difference.

Thankfully, because of the cost and low reward, such instances are rare.

With email, spoofing is really easy and there are loads of rewards. A criminal could write a simple script to send thousands per minute and use it to mine information that they could use for all sorts of things, like identity theft.

There is a way to protect yourself from spoofing: Sender Policy Framework (SPF). SPF is a technology that almost all mail servers use, to ensure that the server sending the email is authorised to send it. It works by checking the domain name of the apparent sender, and seeing if the IP address of the real sender is on the list of servers authorised to send mail. If it is not, the email is dropped and it will never be received. SPF is optional, so if your client's domain name does not have an SPF record, then anyone can send emails pretending to be from him or her.

There is an easy way to check if your client is protected.


http://tools.bevhost.com/cgi-bin/dnslookup

Enter your domain name in the top box and click 'Submit Form'.

One of the returned rows should begin with 'v=spf1'.

If there is no such row, your client is probably being spoofed. Read more about SPF here: http://www.openspf.org.

I have a free email series called 365 daily innovations, and this tip is day 14. There are another 364 tips for using web technology to make your business more powerful, more productive and more profitable. You should consider signing up here: http://www.bassettprovidentia.com/