Hacked accounts, how?

frosty03 · 14 Jul 2008 at 20:44

Several of my friends email (yahoo/hotmail) and networking sites (friendster, facebook) have been hacked. Usual telltale signs of strange emails coming from their accounts and pleas for money etc...

Question is, these chaps arnt the types who go surfing to "odd" sites. Neither do they download anything "dodgy" from torrents or any p2p programs.

Mostly just ordinary guys and girls. How did their accounts get compromised? More importantly, how does one prevent it from happening? It is very worrying that so many are getting infected....

Conrad11 · 14 Jul 2008 at 20:56

Can you be sure they weren't on dodgy sites?

MSN Virus?

Do they have antivirus/firewall installed?

Virus brought from pen drive.

binaryknight · 14 Jul 2008 at 21:02

wasnt there a lot of "login in here to see whos blocked you" type scams about lately? few of my friends got caught out get you mates to change their passwords asap

frosty03 · 14 Jul 2008 at 21:14

Conrad11 said:
Can you be sure they weren't on dodgy sites?

MSN Virus?

Do they have antivirus/firewall installed?

Virus brought from pen drive.

1) Cant be 100% sure, but 3 of them were "goody goody girls", so low probability.

2) Yea, wondered about that, but dont you need to visit dodgy sites or "share" stuff to be infected in the first place?

3) There are viruses transmittable by pen drives? :eek:

PhillyDee · 14 Jul 2008 at 21:17

Of course virii are transmitted by pen drives. Its the same as floppy / cd&dvd-r etc.

b0rn2sk8 · 15 Jul 2008 at 00:04

Same thing happened to me this weekend. Currently virus free (avast, also fresh install 3.5 weeks old, nothing to dodgy yet). Not been on any dodgy websites etc. not to fussed really, had everything moved over to a gmail account already before it happened.

frosty03 · 15 Jul 2008 at 07:15

Were you hit by a virus/trojan that you could identify? If not, how on earth did they compromise your account? Weak password?

TaLLyJ · 15 Jul 2008 at 08:36

They've clearly opened something they shouldn't have...

bledd · 15 Jul 2008 at 09:20

TaLLyJ said:
They've clearly opened something they shouldn't have...

yup

or their 'secret question' is something like "favourite football team"

VeNT · 15 Jul 2008 at 10:20

or place of birth. (if its someone they know.)

JimAroo · 15 Jul 2008 at 15:05

With secret questions you now need to provide the Post code the user used when signing up. Which is an excellent idea.

VeNT · 15 Jul 2008 at 16:07

cos theres NO WAY anyone could know your post code!

eXor · 15 Jul 2008 at 19:10

frosty03 said:
but dont you need to visit dodgy sites

Can you tell the difference between a "dodgy" site and a reputable site that has been infected, just by looking at it?

Malware doesn't discriminate and neither should users, when it comes to security.

Mattus · 16 Jul 2008 at 18:48

Yeah, doesn't necessarily have to be a dodgy site. Could be a reputable site that's been hacked or injected with malware. Could have downloaded a keylogger, or your mate might use the same password for all his websites.