E-mail, chat, & VoIP forum: E-mail account compromised. How do I stop the spammers?

i don't know if this works for sure, but a trick i learned that's supposed to keep a virus that gets into your address book from proliferating and sending itself to all your contacts is to put the first name in your contact list as !0000 and put the address as
!0000@domain.com the virus won't be able to send to that address and it should be stopped in it's tracks. don't know if it really works but i've had a few friends/relatives have their address books commandeered and then sending spam to everyone. i haven't had the problem.

matm2010

I must say, I truly sympathize with your difficulties, because I have been going through this for the past four months, I have had my computer in the shop with the IT professionals 3 times, hard drive wiped clean, started over, and the Geek Squad tells me now that this is a self-replicating virus. MEANING: They can get rid of it, but they cannot keep it from returnng.

I too, am very security conscious, run programs continuously thinking I am protected, only to discover that the hackers are much smarter than I had anticipated, and have dismantled all of the usual programs I use on my computer and have installed their own, leaving me absolutely defenseless. There is almost no way to tell, unless you go digging deep into the registry and utility files to discover inconsistencies. Once you have discovered them, in my case, it has been impossible to identify each and every one of these programs embedded in my system. AND, if you do not eradicate every single speck of invasion, you may as well have spent your time differenty, because you are going to experience he same thng again, and again, and again. Now, they know every aspect of my life, personal and professional, what I do each day, what I talk about in the privacy of my home, every word uttered on my phone with a friend or business associate, the products that I look at and would like to purchase, but because they have also hacked into the bank's security system, taken money at will, leaving me with an empty bank account, and a lot of embarrassment when I go to use my brand new debit card only to find it has been recently compromised, as well. I have discovered that I now "own" a home in California, along with a business, which must be doing pretty well, because I am paying all of their bills out of my small income. They have taken out a least one line of credit at the bank for $25,000, several credit cards, an auto loan, IRA accounts CD's (which I am unable to gain enough information about to determine the value of these accounts.)

This is what it has done to my life and my serenity -- it has robbed me of any peace of mind I ever gained, and knowing that I have no privacy at all, even my conversations that take place in my home are monitored, along with every word spoken on my "smartphone", and I feel so utterly powerless to do anything to right this terrible wrong that has been done to me. I used to be complimented on the calm and inviting atmosphere in my home, leaving my friends a place to come to feel safe and escape all of the difficulties of their world, but now that is gone, as well. I feel like I have been taken behind a building and beaten and worse, totally violated, and with no credibility to be taken seriously by the authorities. I had heard stories of people who had been through these things on a smaller scale, and I am sorry to say I was not very sympathetic, because I had NO IDEA THE IMPACT THAT HAD TAKEN PLACE IN THEIR LIVES. Let me apologize to anyone now who I may have given less than adequate attention, but please understand until you have experienced something on this level yourself, you cannot possibly relate to how it makes you feel and the ruin that can come to your life.

Please, for any who may be judging me, laughing behind my back, saying what an iil-equipped woman to let this happen to her.-- I hope and pray this does not happen to you, and it is getting to be more and more common for the "average citizen" to be hacked these days. This is the most frightening, helpless feeling I have ever experienced, with no hope of any end in sight. My next move is to try borrow money from anyone who will loan it to me to start over with all new equipment, and I am even considering changing my name and identity, including social security number, because these folks are impossible to escape once they get their hold on your life. This is my only hope for any peace in the future, and I am asking any and all of you to send me your best wishes for success, because I need all the help I can get to escape this nightmare.

Thank you CNET for this forum to air and educate the public what is possible to occur in the lives of ANYONE. Even though this may not ever be published, I feel better knowing I tried to tell the truth, and warn any unsuspecting
soul what is possible every time they turn on their power of your beautiful computer. I pray this never happens to you, but if it does, please know you are not alone, and perhaps together we can find a way to stop these animals from ruining one more life. I will not give up, I will continue to fight this, so if you are in any way guilty of invading my home and privacy, look out. I am watching you, too.

Briana 2006 .

I got rid of my hotmail account. I tried it once and never used it and when I logged in, there were over 100 messages from spammers. I got rid of Yahoo because Yahoo was selling my name to advertisers and I was getting too much junk mail at home so I got rid of free services. Free services make money by selling your name and email address.

I suggest changing your email name and password. Some service providers offer you multiple email accounts so I would suggest this. Use one address for friends and family only and a second address for public use. The old advice was to never use the original email address your service provider gives you.

I have a friend that uses her mother's maiden name as her first name to confuse spammers and phishers; I guess you can do what you want as long as it isn't fraud or puts you in a position of fraud.

I had a family member spam me every couple of days. I've also had a co-worker spam me. This is why you might not want to give your email out again. Remember that not everyone is your friend so if you met someone in a chatroom, they could be the cause of your spam. I've had a few people from chatrooms ask too much personal information and my advice is that online friends should probably stay online and never meet in person for the same reason you are having trouble with spam.

There are services that download and filter your email as well as software.

I remember that one website I was on had a bug and exposed email addresses.

Never respond to chain letters. Use BCC when sending email to multiple people.

There were programmers in the chatroom I frequented and others said that they could put their avatar on top of other people's avatar and go through their ports and enter their computer and email. They said they could also tunnel into your email provider if you were logged in.

Log into your service provider if you can and use the "block sender" option. There is a limit to some services.

There are email programs that will delete incoming email if the email is not on the list and they will put your email in a spam folder.

Don't respond to spam. Report incomming spam to your ISP to see if they can block it.

Don't post your email address online.

This might seem like an expensive option but you might want to keep a separate computer for email and a separate one for surfing and daily playing on the internet.

Talk to your representative in congress to inact stronger laws. The state figured out it could make money on making people register their cars, get driver's licenses, issue tickets, etc. The internet really isn't regulated because anyone can still get away with a lot. Until you have to buy postage for email, it isn't very expensive for spammers to operate. If you charged 5 cents an email, it would cut down on some of the nonsense emails but you would still get promotions. The problem is that the internet isn't really well regulated and it is almost a free for all.

Robert, et. al.,

First, the spammers don't need your password to send out the spam, all they need is your address book entries, It is easy enough for them to forge headers and such and have been doing so for years.

But let's think about this for a moment: how would they get your password? Generally, either you have it cached on your machine and/or you have been infected with something. Did you use a public accessible machine at some point? Log on from anyone else's machine? The number of ways to get you password are numerable for those who don't practice safe hex.

I have been using GMail for years and they do a pretty darn good job of keeping SPAM out of my mailbox. My recommendations are as follows:

First, scan your computer with multiple AV scanners. Highly recommended is Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. Also recommended is a tool called SARDU. It will create a bootable USB drive with multiple AV programs running under Linux. This will prevent a virus from loading into memory and hiding itself.

Second, change ALL of your passwords. If they have harvested your email password, how many others have they gotten as well? Do you use the same passwords for all of your sites? I suggest that you come up with a way to have different passwords for each site, or at least, each type of site.

Third, create a Gmail account and forward all of your email from your old address to that account.

Forth, turn off password caching.

Fifth, when/if you use a computer not your own or that is not password protected, use the browser's private mode.

Finally, get in the habit of running a full AV scan on your computer weekly with some tool other than the one you run day to day. No AV tool catches everything. Surprisingly, one of the best AV tools to run on your computer for day to day protection is actually Microsoft's free Security Essentials.

Best of luck,

Mike

And how can I prevent this from happening in the future.

We-e-e-elll, several things. We'll look at email clients first, then computer security.

I use and appreciate one of the oldest (useful) email clients around, which to my knowlege has never been successfully attacked: Eudora 3.0.6 Lite. It is available from ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/eudora/eudoralight/windows/english/, and http://www.oldversion.com/download-Eudora-Light-3.0.6.html. The beaut part is that while this version does understand HTML 2.0, it does not understand JavaScript, EcmaScript, or ActiveX. It stores all your emails as text-type files, and all attachments in the folder of your choice, unlike MS Outlook. It is thus much easier to protect with a good AV -- you don't need the email version of the AV. The downside is that this version is POP only. It does not understand IMAP. But, we can work around this.

The important point of this para is to outlaw MS Outlook from your machine. You don't need that level of institutional insecurity.

OK. Computer security. I have not looked to see what OS you are using -- I assume Windows, since that is the ubiquitous productivity platform. Some versions of Windows, usually the "Professional" flavours, install the IIS server by default, without giving you the chance to say "NO!" This server is then started as a service, automatically, and spruiks for business all day, every day... Many worms rely on this for their lunches, for example Code Red II, Mydoom and Nimda.

If you need to have a server active, then Apache on a separate firewalled machine is appropriate. Of course, you can run IIS if you want, but the separate firewalled machine is of paramount importance.

Do you have UPnP running? Why? You don't need it. Switch it off. It does nothing you can't do, and acts like a mini server touting for business. Worms can quite readily use it as a ladder to climb up thru your modem.

I don't want to get too technical here, but basically, all hardware firewalls (as found in good routers) rely on incoming packets having an explicit invitation. No invite, no entry. Simple, and effective. These firewalls don't normally interrupt out-bound traffic, tho in many cases you can tell them what to allow -- but when (if) you do that, they are very single-minded and effective. Mostly, you can tell them what not to allow, which is a bit chancy. But servers normally bypass the firewall by handing out invites to all and sundry...

Now, the news.

The good news is you can get rid of the problem. Don't bother with AV's etc. Just grab your install discs, reformat the C: drive, and reinstall Windows. From scratch. Oops. Did you back up your data? Just copy all your Docs & Settings straight to another disc -- external backup drives are extremely good. Now reformat.

Of course, the bad news is you need to reinstall all your apps -- OTOH, maybe this will enable you to get rid of old junk you no longer need?

Why reformat? Well, AVs and etc often work, and occasionally they work very well. Sadly however, the path to godliness is long complicated and often expensive. Cleanliness is best acheived by the judicious and generous use of a scrubbing brush.

Now that you have reinstalled Windows -- not forgetting to NOT install IIS -- you need a software firewall. Now I don't normally recommend these, as often the same thing can be done faster and cheaper by your router. However, as noted, hardware solutions can be simple-minded as well as single-minded. Sotware solutions offer a bit more flexibilty. I use and recommend ZoneAlarm, as it actively stealths all your ports. In lay terms, it refuses to acknowlege any uninvited packet, it quietly drops them into cyberspace, never to be seen again. It is also reasonable easy to set up the outbound firewall, mainly because it wants to know who is allowed to call out rather than those who are not allowed. Ummmm... Don't forget to disable UPnP...

NOW you can install your favourite AV. And then you can have a look at web-mail. My favourite is FastMail (https://www.fastmail.fm), now owned by Opera AG. It is very secure, very reliable, and you can use IMAP -- and even POP in some accounts.

To wrap up. The basic of security is to assume you have been compromised, and work on how to mitigate the damage. You mitigate the damage by partitioning the data and data handling. There is no security in having the world's most frequently targeted email client with a proven track record of insecurity. Having an active server on your productivity boxes is literally suicidal. Firewalling is not the universal panacea.

I have deliberately avoided passwords and etc. That's a whole world of tech stuff, which simply doesn't do any good once the malware is inside your box.

Gordon.

If you suspect that your email account has been compromised, consider changing not only your password but the security questions as well.

This happened me once with my hotmail account. Well actually several times in a few weeks. Even tough I changed passwords, reset the account and did all I could think of, there were still loads of emails getting sent from my account.

I then realized, that the 200 emails got sent whilst I used the Uni wifi. Didn't hear of anyone else having that problem but when I stopped using the uni Wifi, the emails stopped. must have been a virus in Uni system.

So: Don't log on to accounts on non-private networks. Including work accounts.

I logged into my email acct on someone else's pc, and a keylogger got my password. In a few days, everyone in my address book was getting spam (including my secondary email account) from a chinese electronics store.
My solution was: delete entire address book contacts, then entered the "report abuse" address (it was a msn account). In less than a day the emails were halted by msn... I checked with former email contact to determine how fast this worked.
Then I changed my password, and notified the owner of the aforementioned pc about their security problem.
One thing I forgot to do was back up my address book. But I got much more cautious about logging into my email acct. Now it is ONLY on my home pc's, and I regularly check for mal-ware, spyware, etc with More Than One security program, on the theory that if one program misses the problem, the secondary program should catch it. I only run one security program full time (in the background, and I don't recommend any specific one as most of them are pretty good), but start/run program #2 about once a week or so. I rarely get bad news using this method, and no more account hacks.

But, here is the most important one of them all: Do you use the same Internet Security Suite as the one that your I.S.P. uses onto their own Servers? You must let the I.S.P. staff of IT administrators and online mail room verifiers to look into everything that will be received by them, before being sent to you via the web address given out to you.

The web address must be in constant surveillance by the I.S.P. Servers in order to catch these wrongdoers of cybersurfers.

So, I figured out that my I.S.P is using AVG in conjuncture with BitDefender(No longer needed, now, for upgraded security reasons). Also, found out that their own client's downloadeable version is no longer current and pertinent for a proper protection. Therefore, I purchased the 2012 version of the AVG's Internet Security Suite for making sure that the programming of such anti-malware and anti-phishing featured apps are pertinent and current on a bi-daily frequency(min. daily is preferrable).

A strong password constitute of alphabetical characters + numerical characters and, vice-versa. Mine is 10 keystrokes long but, a 12 keystrokes long one would be preferable for targeted person like yourself.

Hope that enstrengthen your protection against these malevolent people of the internet, from now on.

Assuming you've done what most good PC owners do and that is use a quality anti-virus / internet security program - AND keep it's subscription updated, than it is not likely coming from your computer.

An Email you send out with a number of recipients in it could land on someone else's inflected system. From there a virus program could simply capture your sending address, and those of who you sent it to (hence only some of your contacts). Then it either sends that data to his own system somewhere where he "spoofs" sending out emails as if coming from you, or he does it right from your friends computer.

The likely answer is that one or your recipients does not have really good anti-virus etc, and is the source of the problem - again assuming my first sentence is correct. So contact each of them on the suspect email distribution list and let them know to check THEIR systems.

I didn't read all your answers, but it looks like everyone is telling you how to prevent a hacker from hacking you/your email.

FYI, when it happened to one of my email accounts, after doing the obvious of changing my password, I contacted my email provider and reported to them that they needed to prevent this person from using my email account to send spam. You need to find what email you need to send your complaint to since most providers have several email addresses for different things. (You could try sending it to 'spam' or 'abuse' @provider.com)

The other thing I did, I reported the incident to the FBI and asked them to prevent this person from spoofing me agian. The address I used for that is 'spam@uce.gov'.

I didn't change my email address nor did I discard it and so far, I haven't had any problem for over 2 years. The mistake the person did with me was that he sent me a spam email from my own email address. Now, I KNEW that I hadn't sent it.......

Oh, yes, VERY IMPORTANT: You need to send them the original email as a 'reply', not 'forward' and not an attachment, and you HAVE to send the original header.

Hope I was some help and this clears it all up for you.

I use a service called Spamex to forward my email to me. For $19 a year, Spamex allows me to create a unique email address for each one I give out (e.g. CNN_rkf@spamex.com). That way, if an email address gets harvested, and I receive spam, I can just turn that individual address off. Once spammers start getting bounce backs, they don't sell the address and in most cases, they discard it. I can then either turn it on again or create a new one for that business.
I never give out my real email address, so it cannot fall into the clutches of the spammers. I have not seen a piece of spam email in months. I kind of miss the Nigerian scam letters.
The other advantage of using Spamex is that I can redirect addresses individually or enmass to another address of mine. So when I change email providers, the switch over is simple and easy. I don't have to inform everyone in the world.
By the way, I am not affiliated in any way. The service has very few bells and whistles, but it works.

For the last few months I have been receiving multiple e-mails each week from a "King's Casino". The first few times I blocked the sender but I have noticed that it comes from a different e-mail address each time. Not sure if this qualifies as spam but it doesn't appear that there is any way to stop it. My e-mail program recognizes it as junk mail so it always ends up there. I then have to delete it which moves it to the deleted folder and then have to delete again to totally get rid of it. Just a real nuisance.

Had the same problem happening from a Hotmail account. And solved it with a three part solution:

First ran malware and virus scan on the computer to ensure the hard drive was clean

Second changed the password on my account

Third made sure I logged out of my email account every time I was done, i.e. not just closing the window.

I found the malware and with the new password it stopped. I could see it happening previously in the account because of return to sender messages on emails I had not sent and because the hackers were deleting my sent mail after they did the dirty deed.

Been squeeky clean since I took these three steps.

Things I have learned from experience.
First : biggest is not always best in Anti-Virus .Just because a ISP bundles it ,doesn't mean its good. I like Avast for example.

Second: Try multiple anti-malwares to remove a problem. Malwarebytes, Superanti-Spyware & Spybot would be a great start. Take a careful look at the add-ons& toolbars in your browser. If it's not a trusted name, I would remove them. It's good to keep them at a minimum anyway (for performance). Just a run with a single Anti-virus or single anti spyware, can miss something. And that something can be sending even more trouble your way.

Third: Remove all temporary files and not recognized or needed objects.

Fourth: Always use strong passwords. Incorporate different tenses, numbers and symbols. And never use your pet's name or obvious identifier connected to you as a password.

Fifth: I use IE to a bare minimum. I prefer Firefox with the Bit defender add-on and a script protection add-on, Google, or Safari for windows..