Hi all, not sure if this is appropriate forum since there is no 'security' thread for mac (hopefully never needed).
I received an email from a contact, reading their correct email address in the 'from' field in Apple mail (coming from my Gmail, I believe). With a link like:
http://johndoe.wordpres.us/08/10/something.html ; now I usually don't blindly click, but I usually have no need to fear...
I clicked w/o thinking, believing someone else I know has a blog they just gotta tell the world their opinions from. A nanosecond after I clicked, I noticed the one 's' on wordpres and was directed to some enlarging penile site or something, quickly closed window and cursed Russians.
In about two days, my dad said he got an email from me with my address and same thing, with cc's in the email to him of others in my address book.
There's not much on this online as of yet, aside from being called a spam tool. Please help me 1) understand what this process is referred to in the tech world (the process of scraping contact info) and 2) is it scraping my address book or my email address cache? 3) how does it work, and only if link is clicked? and 4) should I have other concerns after being molested in this way on my Mac?
Much thanks for any enlightenment or like stories.
nf
I received an email from a contact, reading their correct email address in the 'from' field in Apple mail (coming from my Gmail, I believe). With a link like:
http://johndoe.wordpres.us/08/10/something.html ; now I usually don't blindly click, but I usually have no need to fear...
I clicked w/o thinking, believing someone else I know has a blog they just gotta tell the world their opinions from. A nanosecond after I clicked, I noticed the one 's' on wordpres and was directed to some enlarging penile site or something, quickly closed window and cursed Russians.
In about two days, my dad said he got an email from me with my address and same thing, with cc's in the email to him of others in my address book.
There's not much on this online as of yet, aside from being called a spam tool. Please help me 1) understand what this process is referred to in the tech world (the process of scraping contact info) and 2) is it scraping my address book or my email address cache? 3) how does it work, and only if link is clicked? and 4) should I have other concerns after being molested in this way on my Mac?
Much thanks for any enlightenment or like stories.
nf