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The ronster

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 3, 2008
1
0
Hello. I've just had a hacker get into my Hotmail account and send a spam to everyone on my contacts list. My Mac is iMac, running on OSX Tiger. has anyone else had anything similar?
 

Silver-Fox

macrumors 65816
Jan 8, 2007
1,091
2
England
not your mac, they would have obtained your user name and password some how, have you shared this with everyone, logged in to a computer and saved the details, or even mates took it?
 

aosman

macrumors 6502
Jan 19, 2008
251
0
Def. not the mac. My guess would be that you didn't log off a public computer, or someone used yours.

or maybe you used your last name as your password....
 

johny5

macrumors 6502a
Mar 31, 2007
751
11
UK
My guess is that you entered your login details on one of those fake websites that claim to show you who has you blocked on MSN?

theyre all fake and grab your details, very dangerous especially if you have banking details sent to your hotmail accounts!
 

Bulldog VII

macrumors 6502
Jul 10, 2007
394
0
London
It might not even be from your computer, some viruses attack address books & send emails out from a third persons computer pro-porting to be from yours??
 

Jorisk

macrumors newbie
May 14, 2009
1
0
I had the same problem,

And I really don't mind them messing around with mijn account there is no important information on there anyway but I would like to get my contacts back...

Any suggestions?
 

angelwatt

Moderator emeritus
Aug 16, 2005
7,852
9
USA
I had the same problem,

And I really don't mind them messing around with mijn account there is no important information on there anyway but I would like to get my contacts back...

Any suggestions?
Contact Hotmail. If you still have access to the account you can export the contacts, if you don't, you can use the forgot your password help they have. There's nothing Mac related to the problem though (just in case the other posts didn't make that clear).
 

modular

macrumors regular
Apr 10, 2009
165
0
I used to get hotmail passwords when i was in high school (i was a little immature and bored...).

the way I did it (and hope maybe you can avoid it this way), is I created an website that looked identical to hotmail's. then I'd bookmark it in the browsers bookmark bar. when people came to use the computer, a lot of them just clicked the bookmark, and typed in their username/password into the fields on MY page. upon click the submit button, i'd have the site send their info my my own email, and then the site would redirect them to the real hotmail page - so it just looked like a hotmail error. they'd log in a second time and it would work as normal.

sounds stupid, but it worked. (i dont do that anymore)
 

RandomKamikaze

macrumors 6502a
Jan 8, 2009
900
56
UK
I used to get hotmail passwords when i was in high school (i was a little immature and bored...).

the way I did it (and hope maybe you can avoid it this way), is I created an website that looked identical to hotmail's. then I'd bookmark it in the browsers bookmark bar. when people came to use the computer, a lot of them just clicked the bookmark, and typed in their username/password into the fields on MY page. upon click the submit button, i'd have the site send their info my my own email, and then the site would redirect them to the real hotmail page - so it just looked like a hotmail error. they'd log in a second time and it would work as normal.

sounds stupid, but it worked. (i dont do that anymore)

That's what phishing is.

Other ways that they could've obtained your password:

They knew the answer to your secret question
Social Engineering
You saved your details on a public computer
You signed in on a Windows computer that was infected with something
 

Jethryn Freyman

macrumors 68020
Aug 9, 2007
2,329
2
Australia
You didn't get "hacked", you got phished, meaning you entered your password onto a fake login page (or they just guessed your password.) If you have ever entered your password on a Windows computer, it could have been picked up by any number of nasties.
 
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