Anybody seeing surge in spam emails from hijacked accounts?

Anybody seeing surge in spam emails from hijacked accounts?#6662

By redruggers - Wed Jul 04, 2012 9:14 am

- Wed Jul 04, 2012 9:14 am #6662

Emails from known addresses (in my gmail contacts list) that contain only a link, presumably toxic.

I used to get one of these every few weeks. In the past week it has gotten to be many per day, especially the past couple of days. I don't know why or how this would be associated with the implosion of VW, but the affected account has pretty much only addresses of people I know through VW.

And is there any recommended way of addressing these (except of course deleting them)?

Rug Roller
(not redrugger....)
With deepest sympathies to anyone stranded in monitor-queue purgatory -- or did they all give up?

Re: Anybody seeing surge in spam emails from hijacked accoun#6669

By moneymaker - Wed Jul 04, 2012 11:42 am

- Wed Jul 04, 2012 11:42 am #6669

I can't say for sure it's related to VW either but my yahoo email was hacked and used to send out spam this past weekend. I only used that email for RC for the last few years so I have to assume that it has something to do with the breakdown of this site or the other site that has started up. I find it more than a little concerning from a security standpoint...

Thank you Kiki! It took you about 2 minutes to fix it so I could post. The previous people couldn't pull that off in 3 weeks!

Re: Anybody seeing surge in spam emails from hijacked accoun#6672

By Jammer - Wed Jul 04, 2012 11:48 am

- Wed Jul 04, 2012 11:48 am #6672

I've gotten about 10 of them also...as far as I can tell, they are all from people I know with yahoo accounts. I would think this is more likely a problem with yahoo then with VW or VC as some of these contacts have not been active here for a long while.

Re: Anybody seeing surge in spam emails from hijacked accoun#6676

By Superguy - Wed Jul 04, 2012 12:35 pm

- Wed Jul 04, 2012 12:35 pm #6676

Yahoo sent me two alerts of my account being hijacked. I have changed the PW for the account. If you have anYahoo email, the alert is upper right.

Re: Anybody seeing surge in spam emails from hijacked accoun#6682

By redruggers - Wed Jul 04, 2012 2:18 pm

- Wed Jul 04, 2012 2:18 pm #6682

Jammer wrote:I've gotten about 10 of them also...as far as I can tell, they are all from people I know with yahoo accounts. I would think this is more likely a problem with yahoo then with VW or VC as some of these contacts have not been active here for a long while.

Mine are about half yahoo and half hotmail.

Rug Roller
(not redrugger....)
With deepest sympathies to anyone stranded in monitor-queue purgatory -- or did they all give up?

Re: Anybody seeing surge in spam emails from hijacked accoun#6684

By BandH - Wed Jul 04, 2012 2:25 pm

- Wed Jul 04, 2012 2:25 pm #6684

We started getting them about 3 days ago block of 6 all same time, couple saying unable to deliver as if we had sent them all with attachments. Never had any before, plus now had 4 'one time invites from VC' to join them as well :?:

PS ours is a hotmail account

Re: Anybody seeing surge in spam emails from hijacked accoun#6707

By shadowrydr - Wed Jul 04, 2012 4:58 pm

- Wed Jul 04, 2012 4:58 pm #6707

OMFG MY FREE EMAIL ADDRESS IS BEING OVER RUN WITH SPAM

Re: Anybody seeing surge in spam emails from hijacked accoun#6761

By cerebio - Wed Jul 04, 2012 11:44 pm

- Wed Jul 04, 2012 11:44 pm #6761

I've seen more spam from hotmail in particular but yahoo as well of late. Nothing to do with VW as far as I can tell.

Most e-mail clients will allow you to flag messages as spam or junk. That will alleviate the symptoms usually as your mail client 'learns' the signature features of these mails and will automatically flag messages that are similar. Either your mail client will automatically isolate junk mail in a separate folder, which is nice, or you can set up a rule to do it. It all depends on your mail client how well this works.