/NOTE: Missing attribution lines were inserted due to use of WLM v15 by
Quilljar which doesn't add them nor did Quilljar bother to add them./
Quilljar wrote:
> David H. Lipman wrote...
>
>> Quilljar said:
>>
>>> David H. Lipman wrote...
>>>
>>>> Change the password to your Webmail account ASAP and make sure it
>>>> is a Strong Password.
>>>
>>> I can do that but why my webmail account only
>>
>> That's probably what was compromised.
>
> I have never had any contacts list in my Yahoo mail. I do not know of
> any other webmail connection that i may have.But I have certainly
> changed my password!
The webmail login credentials are the SAME as what you recorded in your
local e-mail client. After using the webmail interface to your
*account* to change your login credentials (usually just the password)
then you'll have to update the accounts defined in your *unidentified*
local e-mail client, too.
There are a few (usually old) spambots that usurp your e-mail client to
use it to send the outgoing spam but any decent anti-virus/malware
program will probably catch those pests on your computer. It's clumsy
to use your own e-mail client plus more likely to be visible than to run
a spambot process on your computer. Also, it is more likely that your
address book's contents got harvested and sent elsewhere to get use to
generate the spam e-mails.
Get a copy of the spam e-mails so you can see where it came from by the
Received headers in it. Then you (or we) can tell if the spam is
originating from your webmail account (i.e., it got hacked) or from
somewhere else. If the contacts got harvested and sent somewhere else,
your webmail account wasn't hacked so it's not the source of the spam
and changing your account's password will have no effect on the spam
generated from elsewhere.
Also, besides changing the password in your e-mail account (up on the
server), also change whatever information is requested by their "Forgot
Password" process. If it was your webmail account that got hacked,
changing your password means they'll just use your same old info
requested by the "Forgot Password" process and they'll be back in. In
fact, you might find the hacker already changed that data to something
they will remember. Change to a STRONG password *and* change whatever
gets used by the "Forgot Password" process.
So when might you get around to performing a scan of your computer with
a decent anti-virus/malware program? You have yet to mention doing so.
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