Hey friend! (e-mail hijacking?)
Anselm Lingnau
Message 61869
· 2 Oct 2011 14:18:07
· Fixed-width font
· Whole thread
Moira Theriault wrote:
> I must confess that it is my email address that has been hijacked and I
> have no idea what to do about it. I discovered this when I received
> returned mail this morning as a result of these messages being sent to
> addresses that are no longer valid.
> I am going to contact Earthlink and my antivirus software provider but,
> unfortunately the damage is done. I even received a request from a Yahoo
> Group Moderator to unsubscribe from the Group. How embarrassing!
> I am and have been a Scottish Country dancer all my life, over 50 years and
> have been a legitimate member of Strathspey.org for many years.
> I am so sorry this occurred.
First of all, this isn't the end of the world. That sort of thing happens all
the time and there is little one can do about it, at least retroactively. It
doesn't even have to mean that your own machine is compromised – just the
other day I received a fair number of error messages (hundreds!) from mail
servers all over the world because some spammer apparently decided to forge
some spam under a mail address I last used a decade or so ago (but which still
works and is forwarded to one of my current accounts).
I had a look at the message in question, and one thing that jumps out is that
as far as I can tell the mail wasn't actually sent from Moira's own computer.
It looks as if it was submitted to Earthlink's web mail interface from a
machine with the IP address 218.12.2.148, which doesn't have an official name
but appears to be located in China. So one thing Moira should be looking into
to sort this out is the security of her web-mail account, rather than the
security of her own computer.
Which is not to say, everybody, that the security of your own computers can to
be neglected. Today I won't go into the number-one thing you can do to be safe
from viruses and »trojans« (people who have been on this list for a while know
what *I* would recommend), but do make sure that you have up-to-date virus
scanners etc. and know how to use them! And of course choose sensible
passwords for the web services that you use. For an interesting take on that
topic see http://xkcd.com/936/ .
Anselm
--
Anselm Lingnau, Mainz/Mayence, Germany ................. xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
-- Herman Melville
