I have had a MBP for over a year now and have never had a problem. My email was hacked this week and spammed some viagra link to basically everyone in my contact list. I have asked questions before on this forum about viruses and everyone always sends me that link that "your mac does not have a virus". Well, if I don't have a virus, how could this have happened, and what do I need to do now to protect myself ??? Please help, I have no idea what to do now. All help is greatly appreciated!
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My email was hacked- do I have a virus? PLEASE HELP
- Thread starter rmodonne
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Your email account was hacked. It has nothing to do with your computer. Change your email passwords to something complex. No viruses exist in the wild that can run on Mac OS X, and there never have been any, since it was released 10 years ago. The handful of trojans that exist can be easily avoided with some basic education, common sense and care in what software you install:
It would help you to get past the idea that when something happens that you don't expect or understand, that a virus is to blame. Instead, find out what's causing the problem. Malware is the last possibility on Mac OS X... not the first.
I think that it's more likely that someone somehow gained access from guessing or finding out your email password, or through some sort of exploit specific to your email provider. If you use the same password for different accounts this is even more likely. Who is your email provider?
Right now I would say change at least your email account password and secret questions.
If your password isn't complex, it's easy to hack. Make sure your password includes upper and lower case letters, numbers and special characters.
If they accessed your email, they could get whatever information is included in your emails. If those emails include passwords to financial accounts or websites, they could get more. It depends on what your emails contain.
Weak passwords are the most common cause. Wireless network sniffing is a common method used to compromise accounts either via accounts that don't have encrypted logins or sophisticated MITM attacks.
If the compromised account can be used to reset other account passwords, then more security sensitive data could be exposed. Many online accounts allow the password to be reset via an associated email account.
Tips about increasing your online security can be found in the "Mac Security Suggestions" link in my sig.
Consider a new email provider as well. Gmail may be a good choice for you. You can forward your Yahoo! emails to Gmail, then slowly begin to switch over. You're fine, like everyone else said, your Yahoo! email account was hacked, not your computer.
I get emails all the time from people on my contact list spamming for erectile dysfunction drugs. I think your contact recipients will understand.
Because there is no known trojan or virus out in the wild for OS X, more than likely your password was very weak on Yahoo, you used an non-secure method to access the internet (unsecure wifi, a pubic computer) or someone social engineered the password out of you (maybe its your birthday and that is posted on Facebook. You'd be amazed at the number of people who do this and how easy it is to get these passwords).
After your bank account your primary email should have the most difficult to guess password.
For forums such as macrumors and similar stuff you can always use the same password. No real harm done when it gets stolen. But with email access one can do quite a lot of harm. You can get access to Amazon accounts and other things where a highjacker can do loads of damage.
Be smart about passwords and this shouldn't happen again.
I prefer the mulit level approach.
Highest (banking > never save in browser, often change, never something simple)
2nd level (primary email)
3rd (shopping sites, amazon ..., spam email)
4th all the forums, stuff I only register once, things than can get hacked with no serious damage to expect.
For the last I got a short password that is only complex enough to be accepted by the pw checking software.
The highest level password I often cannot remember and if I write them down it is on places where nobody would look nor understand what it is meant for, nor how you need to adjust it to get the actual passwords.
It is quite save to remember a certain private algorithm than you can even write them down without anybody who has access to your room being able to figure it out. It is not difficult to remember an algorithm but to remember long complex pwds is. If you live in dorms with kind of an open door policy like I used to one has to be careful.
For forums such as macrumors and similar stuff you can always use the same password. No real harm done when it gets stolen. But with email access one can do quite a lot of harm. You can get access to Amazon accounts and other things where a highjacker can do loads of damage.
Be smart about passwords and this shouldn't happen again.
I prefer the mulit level approach.
Highest (banking > never save in browser, often change, never something simple)
2nd level (primary email)
3rd (shopping sites, amazon ..., spam email)
4th all the forums, stuff I only register once, things than can get hacked with no serious damage to expect.
For the last I got a short password that is only complex enough to be accepted by the pw checking software.
The highest level password I often cannot remember and if I write them down it is on places where nobody would look nor understand what it is meant for, nor how you need to adjust it to get the actual passwords.
It is quite save to remember a certain private algorithm than you can even write them down without anybody who has access to your room being able to figure it out. It is not difficult to remember an algorithm but to remember long complex pwds is. If you live in dorms with kind of an open door policy like I used to one has to be careful.
Email Addresses hacked?
I use the mail app on my iMac, which is running OS 10.5.8. (I can no longer upgrade the operating system.)
All of my emails are downloaded from Comcast directly to my Mail app on iMac.
I do not access or store emails on Comcast.
All of my email addresses are stored on my iMac in the Address Book app.
No addresses are stored directly in my Comcast.net email account.
Over the past week, I have received numerous emails from people in my address book saying they have received email messages from me with a link in the body of the text.
Can anyone explain how this happened and what I need to do to correct the problem?
I use the mail app on my iMac, which is running OS 10.5.8. (I can no longer upgrade the operating system.)
All of my emails are downloaded from Comcast directly to my Mail app on iMac.
I do not access or store emails on Comcast.
All of my email addresses are stored on my iMac in the Address Book app.
No addresses are stored directly in my Comcast.net email account.
Over the past week, I have received numerous emails from people in my address book saying they have received email messages from me with a link in the body of the text.
Can anyone explain how this happened and what I need to do to correct the problem?
As a tip, the password for your email be should never be used elsewhere because it gets compromised it can cause a domino effect. If the hacker gets your email address and password for some site and the same credentials work for your email account the hacker can hit the "forgot my password" buttons on any site you used the email address and receive the password reset emails.
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I bet your comcast.net email account was hacked and Comcast does have a bunch of info in your account.
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I bet your comcast.net email account was hacked and Comcast does have a bunch of info in your account.
If Comcast email security is as bad as Yahoo's then it's probably their servers have been hacked (Yahoo's was a few times in the past).
Be careful where you use your device. They have software that others use in public that your MBPro thinks it is logging onto the internet but it is someone laptop recording every key stroke you make.
First step is to change your passwords.
Not really... Packet interception maybe, but not a key logger. And if it's going to someones laptop they'd also need to spoof the SSID (possibly the MAC address too) of of the real Wi-Fi and mask the real ones SSID broadcasting (not easy at all). You should read up on how theses things work before you post things like this.
An important thing to note that most people don't know:
Email can be sent from your email address without needing access from your account.
The way email is designed the "from" field can be set to anything. I could sent an email "from" your account without ever needing to log in, I just need to change the from field.
I'd check to see if these messages are in your sent folder. Someone could have covered their tracks and deleted them there too, but most times I see this no one got hacked. I get these emails all the time from my "friends", and all that happened was someone was sending out emails with a fake from address. No one's accounts or machines were hacked.
Email can be sent from your email address without needing access from your account.
The way email is designed the "from" field can be set to anything. I could sent an email "from" your account without ever needing to log in, I just need to change the from field.
I'd check to see if these messages are in your sent folder. Someone could have covered their tracks and deleted them there too, but most times I see this no one got hacked. I get these emails all the time from my "friends", and all that happened was someone was sending out emails with a fake from address. No one's accounts or machines were hacked.
So that would explain why my mom complained to me that my gmail with 2-step verification was hacked and sending spam to her yahoo email? I thought it wasn't me!
Yep, here's an article on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_spoofing
I'm guessing that no one in this thread was probably actually hacked.