Annie, your email has been hacked

8 years ago

From China. I got an email supposedly from you with a link I stupidly clicked on.It went to a web page with a .cn domain name. Somebody has access to your email and is probably hiding malware behind Gwen Stefani's diet tips.

Everybody else, do not click on links without investigating! I should have known better.

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Olychick

8 years ago

last modified: 8 years ago

I heard a great story on NPR about how to have safe and easy to remember passwords and the suggestion is to make it really long and all letters (if the site lets you). So, the idea is to make a sentence you'll remember, like, "ilovemydogspattyandsamantha." If you use all letters, the programs hackers use to try to unlock your password, has to try 26 times to get a letter but only 10 tries for each number. And the longer you make the sentence, the less likely it is that their program will be designed to try 15 or 20 characters (their programs might stop at 12 or something).

I guess I could make this cooking related: I think his example was ilovepeanutbutterandjellysandwiches. Not all sites will let you do something so long, but it's worth a try.

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Comments (14)

writersblock (9b/10a)
8 years ago
last modified: 8 years ago
That doesn't necessarily mean Annie has been hacked, only that someone has harvested somebody's address book with her address in it. Spam like that never comes from the address that is shown. Usually it has nothing to do with the computer of the person whose address you see.
cloudy_christine
Original Author
8 years ago
But it was sent to me as if from Annie. They had my address. They have the address of everyone in Annie's email.
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Thank you, Aurora, great explanations. Lucky, very funny! Silvana, no, you did not get hacked and don't have to do anything. I got hacked because I did not follow my own advice. I got an email from an unfamiliar address on a topic I did not recognize with a link that was also unfamiliar. So, there were three clues. But I clicked away. That is all it takes, one click, for a hacker to be able to clone something that resembles a person's name and address. To get rid of a spam email, just send it to the spam folder on your email account, then empty the spam folder. You can change your password if you want. I put a more complete explanation on a new thread. However, Aurora explained it better than I could! It would be good if the Moderators would read this and remove the two posts with the bogus links on them. I will try to contact the Moderators to have those two posts by the hacker removed from the threads, however, I don't think that was what caused the hacking of my email. Joanne This post was edited by fortyseven on Wed, Nov 26, 14 at 0:45
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Sorry to hear about your trouble, Larry. I've received nothing fishy from you. I've had my email taken over a couple of times. My Facebook account, too. I was apparently stranded in London with the kids on a last-minute vacation. Yeah, that's something I'd do. Heh. We have Macs and have not had any viruses since making the switch several years ago. I'm a complete computer moron so it has to be pure luck that I've not yet caught one of the rare Mac viruses. I hear they're getting more common. Oh, I did have my debit card number stolen a couple of years back. The bank caught it and was very good about it. I guess I'd been buying up several hundred dollars in fancy underwear in Norway or something and they thought that might be a bit odd for me. Like old age, the internet is not for sissies, huh? Diane
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Think I might close all my browsers and delete my cookies for yahoo with something like CCleaner. Then I might make sure I accept yahoo cookies, and go to www.yahoo.com and login. Use CCleaner to always save that cookie. Tell my browser to always accept their cookies. Then only have to login once every two weeks hopefully.
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plllog
8 years ago
They can strip those off of e-mails intercepted en route. Or the e-mail address book online might have been hacked. It doesn't necessarily mean full intrusion.

Good of you to post a notice and reminder.
carolb_w_fl_coastal_9/10
8 years ago
Did the sender's email match Annie's?

That's the first thing I check when I receive suspicious mail. It never matches my contact's email either.
Solsthumper
8 years ago

I used to get emails from, what appeared to be, friends and members of this forum, many years ago.

Oftentimes, the subject line appeared sketchy to me. (Either the message itself, or the spelling seemed a little off. It's common knowledge I have trust issues) , so I never clicked to open any of them.

If you'd like to avoid this, next time you get an email that may not appear legit, try this:

Hover your mouse over the link. It will show the URL that link will send you to, if you click on it.

You will notice that the domain does not match the source of the email.

Hovering your mouse over a link, will reveal its true destination.

Sol
cloudy_christine
Original Author
8 years ago
last modified: 8 years ago
Yes. I should have been much more cautious. Once I am suspicious of an email, I check things out, and above all never click on a link in email. But in this case, first thing in the morning, things that should have alerted me did not. For example, there was no subject line. But I often send emails without one. I was actually thinking maybe Annie had some news, possibly bad, about someone. Not anyone in particular, but maybe to do with the flood (I'd been wishing we'd heard from May (Lowspark).
l pinkmountain
8 years ago
Hey, anyone can get tripped up, considering how much "virtual" junk we get bombarded with on a daily basis. And the tricks keep evolving too!
cloudy_christine
Original Author
8 years ago
last modified: 8 years ago
Karen (Riverrat) just heard from May! She is okay! See Peppi's thread.
annie1992
8 years ago
Great. Thanks CC, for the heads up. I got hacked a couple of months ago, Yahoo wanted me to change my password. I did and promptly got locked out of email altogether for over a week. Ugh.

I'll change it again.....

Annie
cloudy_christine
Original Author
8 years ago
Or just four random common words. See https://xkcd.com/936/
plllog
8 years ago
I have some long passwords. Throw in capitals and you get another 26 options, then there are special characters. Most nowadays require at least one captital, one lower case and one special, and at least eight overal, and remembering these gets really tricky, but writing them down, and especially putting them in your browser's autofil, is the least secure of all!

The long ones really work pretty well and are easier to remember. If you have to have a special and captital, it's not as secure as random, but you can set single rules, such as the seventh letter will be the only capital, and the fifth character will be an asterisk. If it's not someone who has watched you, or heard your keyboard, i.e., if it's just a 'bot, that's just about as secure as if they were random. The most secure password is long and totally random, but good luck remembering if you don't use it several times daily. And even then, you have to hope the hacker can't reverse engineer the encoding in the recognition system (that's nigh on impossible, but people do the impossible daily).
annie1992
8 years ago
OK, mine was 14 characters long, with 2 numbers, one uppercase letter and one "special" character. Wasn't good enough, apparently.....

Annie
plllog
8 years ago
That means your password wasn't hacked. No one would bother doing that with a strong password just for email spoofing. Either the admin of your ISP was hacked, someone who legitimately has the contact info was, or the offenders stipped the headers off transiting emails.