Yahoo mail spam with my email address?

sastusbulbas

sastusbulbas

sastusbulbas

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Joined
26 May 2008
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1,876
Hi all,

Have had an issue with my Yahoo mail account, many of my contacts seem to have had spam from my account, but there has been nothing sent from my account as far as I can see.

Clearly it has been infected or hacked for my contact details to have been accessed. I have done the password changes, checked my details and such. But now doubts have set in.

Any advice or suggestions on what I can do to check the account is not infected, any software suggestions or such?

I have done scans with the PC software of the phones drives but nothing. Not sure if there is specific software better suited to cleaning an email account specifically.
 
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Ditch Yahoo. This happened to my Dad. Yahoo are absolutely useless and this has happened to a lot of people. Just get rid of them. Yahoo domains look outdated as well.
 
If I've read that correctly, you're using your phone to check your e-mail?

If that is so, are you using wi-fi hotspots to do that when you're out and about and are you using the same ones?

If it's yes to both (and yes to using the same wi-fi hotspots) then you might have been the victim of an evil twin attack (where someone creates a wi-fi hotspot that is identical to one that you would trust and uses it to steal user data), or it could be that your password was easy to guess and the spammer is leaving no trace by removing any emails from the sent folder (that happened to me once and I found out when I looked (the yahoo mailer daemon messages were an hint as well) in the sent folder (I had several sent emails in there) and found that it had been cleaned out as the spammer had cleared out all their messages along with those that were in there already).

Regardless, you should change your password and if the phone in question uses the android OS then there are anti-virus products available for it.
 
demonix said:
if the phone in question uses the android OS then there are anti-virus products available for it.
Click to expand...

AV for any mobile phone is completely useless and gives a false sense of security to any user. A mobile phone does not allow one app to have access to another app, either Android, Apple or Microsoft, they are all the same in this regard. That's why a mobile is as safe as it is to use.
The chances are the OP simply got scanned while using a public wifi spot. No amount of on phone security would prevent that on an open public wifi spot.
 
Virgin Media user, but the issue may have been while I was using my phone. I had Trust Go security on that, changed to 360 and it found some item that duplicates sms or something?

Anyway, so far, since changing the password, I have had only one mailer daemon message, which may have been hanging over from the previous.

The details of the IP address show the original email that was apparently sent by me seems to have originated in Turkey.

I was also a user on Yahoo groups at one time, and that was full of spam on many occasions, so I am guessing this originated with either a Yahoo user HiFi group or indeed a public WiFi spot, though I don't connect to them?
 
sastusbulbas said:
I was also a user on Yahoo groups at one time, and that was full of spam on many occasions, so I am guessing this originated with either a Yahoo user HiFi group or indeed a public WiFi spot, though I don't connect to them?
Click to expand...

If that's the case, then an evil twin attack can be ruled out since you would have to connect to one of these hotspots, but that does leave a compromised password either because it was obtained through a compromised trusted website where you have login details that shares a password with the email account or the original password was easy to guess allowing for some form of dictionary attack on the account (it's always better to have a password that is a mix of letters, numbers and anything else that can be used as it will make cracking it a lot harder).
 
PapaLazaru said:
Ditch Yahoo. This happened to my Dad. Yahoo are absolutely useless and this has happened to a lot of people. Just get rid of them. Yahoo domains look outdated as well.
Click to expand...

Agreed, my parents both had 'secondary yahoo' emails that they never used, but stored contacts in, then last year I started getting spam from these emails and after a little digging there was a well known Yahoo hack that was such a blatant security flaw that it was ridiculous and people had been reporting it for 6+ months where a Yahoo account would be hacked with no fault of the user.

After that, I think any hassle involved in changing a primary email from Yahoo is well worth the effort.
 
I've had this issue as well, probably about 3 times in the last year.

The mail just refreshes one day and it duplicates all the email in your inbox, so at one point i had to go through 600 emails i already had :|
 
Yahoo email security does seem to be holier than swiss cheese. I tried enabling 2factor on my OH's account and it just didn't do it. Very very poor.
 
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