BBS Related - My e-mail account has been hijacked by a SPAM farm.

[RarlyL8]

This morning when I pulled up my Yahoo! account to check my e-mail I had over 1000 messages in my in box. Business is good but it ain't that good.

Some piece of **** from China/Asia has hijacked my e-mail account and is using it to broadcast their garbage. I assume they have also stolen my contact list - which is the reason I am typing this thread.

Many of you are on my list of contacts. Have you received any junk mail with me as the sender? I promise I do not sell Viagra and I really don't care to know how well you satisfy the ladies.

My in box is filling at a rate of about 100 returned messages an hour, which I cannot keep up with. You can imagine how difficult it is to find any legitimate messages in this pile of returned Chinese hieroglyphics. This is the account I use for ALL of my Porsche dealings.

What can I do about this? HELP!

[Neilk]

It's probably not your account that was hijacked but rather a virus attacked a friend's e-mail account that has you in their address book. Change the password and make sure your spam filter is on.

[RarlyL8]

The garbage that is filling up my in-box are Demon Failure Reports which, I gather, are SPAM that is kicked back by the recipient to the sender (me). Is that correct? That is why I think they are using my account to broadcast the junk mail.

[barney911rs]

Stop using the freebie email services, they are the first things attacked by spammers.

[slodave]

Brian, it is easy to forge an email header. Your account is more than likely OK.

[mede8er]

Sooooo...this coupon I recieved for a free zork is no good???????

[sand_man]

How do we know this message is really from you? Gawd, I'm having "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", flashbacks...

[spuggy]

Originally Posted by RarlyL8

The garbage that is filling up my in-box are Demon Failure Reports which, I gather, are SPAM that is kicked back by the recipient to the sender (me). Is that correct?

Yeh, it's just a reject notice.

That is why I think they are using my account to broadcast the junk mail.

Like Dave says, it's easy to forge an email header with your email address (probably scraped from a web page) as the faked sender.

So when the mail system decides not to deliver the spam, some of them send a bounce. A hangover from a different age, which is only useful if you really are the mail sender.

In point of fact, the mail is most likely bouncing because it's pretending to be from your Yahoo account but isn't signed with Yahoo's domainkeys signature (designed to allieviate problems with forged headers in precisely this situation) or originating from their official mail servers.

Make sure you've changed your account password and double-check your computer(s) have no virii, worms or spyware, and you should be good to go.

Your biggest issue is the amount of bounces. I don't think Yahoo! offers any filters you could set to get rid of them. Their Abuse dept is also singularly useless, IMO.

[RarlyL8]

It seems to have subsided somewhat. I am down to just a few bounced returns an hour.
What a mess. I went through my mailbox in a pannic and moved all the active stuff to saved folders so I could mass-delete this crap.

I did look at a couple of them and the address used was (insert Chinese name here) at RarlyL8.com so it looks like they took my domain name mail address which I currently have linked to dump in my Yahoo! account.

I don't think paying more for a service will stop this. As long as there is no harsh punishment for these crimes it's a free for all. Al Gore needs a swift kick in the nuts, he said this was all his idea right? Ha!

[bextreme1]

You should check your domain email passwords as well.

[WolfeMacleod]

Rarly, check out the spam forums at http://www.dslreports.com

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/scambusters

If you post the header information and the message itself, these guys may be able to find out -exactly- who is responsible.

Also, you can plug the IP addresses and domains into the search at http://www.spamhaus.org They have an excellent database of known spammers and thier domains, hijacked IP addresses, and such.

[Quicksilver]

If you post the header information from a couple of the emails here there are a number of us that can decode it and give you an idea where it came from. Most likely it was sent by some innocent person's computer that is infected with some form of malware so it is likely that it won't do you any good.

Spammers almost as a rule use randomly selected real email addresses. The fact that your domain and more specifically your email address isn't on a spam blocking list made it useful. You might be on some of the blocking lists now though. If you find you are being blocked from friends, etc, in a week or two you might want to add a new address at your domain.

It would be prudent to change the passwords on your email accounts and the management account for your domain. A little paranoia is good because the spammers really are out to get you...

-----
Conceptually email is very similar to good old US mail...
- Just like regular mail you can take an email and put any return address on it and mail it from anywhere.
- The header can provide some clues about an email's actual origin similar to a postmark. Not to detailed but better then nothing.

- The big difference between email and mail is cost: The reason that email spam is a problem is that email basically has no cost so there is no reason that someone can't send millions of emails a day. (and they do...) Just imagine how much junk mail you would receive via US mail if postage, paper, and printing was free.

BTW - Getting 1,000 bounced emails isn't that many when a spammer uses you name. Try getting about 10,000 bounce messages in one day! This was on a coworkers business email and the only solution was to change their email address.

[poorsha]

I went to the office Monday AM and found the same thing.
1210 emails.
99 percent were "no delivery" replies.
Same as you I am now only getting abput 10 a day.
A real pain in the hard drive.
I am interested to find out if you resolve this issue completely but more importantly how do they know if the "gerth of my tool is equal to the measure of her pleasure"???

[RWebb]

You can blame all the Congresspeople who voted for the CANSPAM Act instead of something really effective. Maybe you'd like to Email them right now?

You can blame China for being more interested in preventing their people from reading & posting certain things than in preventing spam - same for E. Europe & Russia in various measures.

You can blame yourself too - here's what you need to do:
- have at least 2 accounts - one is a front-end acct.and the other is the important acct. - never give out the 'secret' imp. acct. to anyone who is not computer knowledgeable and very imp. to get msgs from (not imp. to THEM, imp. to YOU) -- for example, no one on this bbs knows my imp. Email acct. - it NEVER gets posted on a public bbs

- use a large Email service provider who has and maintains spam blockers

- never post your Email address - & if you do, break it up into pieces to prevent bots from harvesting it.

- if you have a business, force customers to use web forms & don't let them use Email -- I hate this and often refuse to deal with companies that do that, so consider the downside -- AND set up a white list of good customers who can use Email

- buy & maintain security software

- mimic what DoD does and have a separate computer that never ever gets connected to the Internet computer - for real safety, that will include never transferring any files by thumb drive, floppies etc. --- this isolated computer contains all the really important data for your business

- do not let kids touch your computer; lock it up -- make them use their own computer or the 'family computer' or 2 cans on a string, whatever

- do NOT have a Myspace, Facebook, or Google acct. -- Goggle keeps ALL your info. FOREVER and a Court just ruled that Youtube will have to cough up all user data to a private company - that will happen to Goggle too

- when you violate any of my rules above -- and you will -- be sure you understand how badly the effects of that violation can be.