[BNM] Email hijacking

[Jay Gooby]

On 10/2/06, Jeff Horne <jaybeeter at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I need a bit of email techie help if you're willing.  Over the last week the
> amount of emails in my inbox has increased about 10 fold and most of them
> are saying "undeliverable" or things like that.

The general reason for these kind of messages is that when people spam
others, they fake the From: address - a lot of email MTUs just blindly
reply back to the from address if the To: address doesn't exist/has a
full mailbox, etc, etc, regardless.

It rarely means your machine/email account has been compromised - if
anything it's generally a sign that someone you know has, because your
address appears in the their address book, and the spamming viruses go
through these and send mail to everyone using other people's details.

If the undeliverable mails don't look like they've been used to try
and forward a virus (check for dodgy attachments) and they're just
regular spam, then its just one of those things - I've got some mail
addresses that have been in existence for 10 or 11 years and these
seem to go through phases of being used as fake From: senders.

It wouldn't hurt to run a virus checker and/or spyware (use ad aware
and spybot search and destroy) on your PC though...

Hope this helps.

-- 
Jay Gooby
jay at gooby.org
+44 (0)7956 182625
skype:jaygooby
http://snipperoo.com
http://blog.snipperoo.com