.mac or mail hacked? Help!

[srobert]

Hello fellas.

I've just received an "out of office" automatic reply email from someone I never sent an email to.

I knew that a PC infected with a virsus could send mail using your account but I never heard of such thing happening on a mac. Could someone fake my email address? It looks OK in the Raw Source. Do you think that this "person" ever received an email from my account?

I'm no tech expert. Is there any other possible scenarios for this?

Thanks for any help

sincerely yours,

srobert... yeah... at mac dot com

[virividox]

your email probably got spoofed, copied down from the adress book on an infected pc.

[SilentPanda]

Most likely what happened was when the My Doom virus went around your friend "Sam" had you in his address book, the virus spoofed your e-mail and sent it to his friend "Bill" and "Bill" is out of the office and the out of office reply came to you since the virus spoofed your e-mail address. I wouldn't worry about your .Mac account being hacked.

[bensisko]

I've had random e-mails come to me from other .mac members (mostly chain mail type stuff) that i've never had any contact with.

I wouldn't worry about it. It could be some wires got crossed via .mac. If this happens repeatedly, then I'd start to worry. You could contact .mac support and see if they have any advice.

[srobert]

Originally posted by SilentPanda
Most likely what happened was when the My Doom virus went around your friend "Sam" had you in his address book, the virus spoofed your e-mail and sent it to his friend "Bill" and "Bill" is out of the office and the out of office reply came to you since the virus spoofed your e-mail address. I wouldn't worry about your .Mac account being hacked.

Strange. Because I can't figure out why any of my friends would know that person ("bill"). It's too distant and unrelated.

[SilentPanda]

Is "Bill" a friend of yours and not of theirs? If you had sent a mass e-mail to both "Bill" and "Sam" they both would have had each other's e-mail address and it's possible that "Sam" still had that e-mail. If he did then the virus could have gotten "Bill"'s e-mail from your e-mail that you sent to "Sam". Confusing enough? :)

[zimv20]

don't worry about it. the worm is taking potshot guesses at usernames, too, judging by how many emails i'm getting addressed to <non-existant-user>@<mywebsite.com>

note that i've set up email for my domain such that any wrongly-addressed emails are forwarded to me.

[srobert]

Originally posted by SilentPanda
Is "Bill" a friend of yours and not of theirs?

Nope

Originally posted by zimv20
don't worry about it. the worm is taking potshot guesses at usernames

Let's hope that's it. This would be the most bening theory.

Recently, I was thinking that because of advertisement on how OSX is virus free, it could taunt some PC virus writers to try their hand at messing with OSX.

[Makosuke]

I've been getting a constant stream of false bounces to any well-known e-mail address ever since the Klez virus several years ago, and the chances of this being anything but that are next to nill. I've turned off all my auto-responders as a result of these false headers.

It really doesn't take much to start the chain; since most viruses (good ol' Doom included) search the address book, incoming mail, the web cache, and sometimes even just the hard drive for e-mail addresses to hammer away at, all it would take would be for anybody who you've e-mailed to have once recieved an e-mail from "Bill", or somebody who also CC'd "Bill" on a message, or if "Bill" puts his e-mail on his web site, just surfed past it at some point recently (so the mailto link was sitting in his web cache).

Of course, if you're really paranoid and you know "Bill" well enough, you could just e-mail him and confirm that the message he got that claimed to be from you was in fact a virus. If so (or he never got it, meaning it got filtered), you're clear.