Yesterday I received an email from one of our clients stating that his Hotmail contacts had been compromised and people were receiving spam from him. I’ll be honest, we get many calls regarding this and it’s always the same thing, spoofing. Spoofing is where you get an email from someone that isn’t really that person. It looks like it’s legitimately from them, but it’s not.
So how do you know if it comes from that person? The simple answer is forward it as an attachment to someone like me, and we’ll take a look at the hidden data to see who it really comes from. The surprising thing for me was that this client’s account truly was hacked. The spam that went out came from his account. Along with that all of his 200 contacts had been erased.
This morning I got to work and I had 3 emails sitting in my inbox from a different client that had the same email sent from their account. The email is as follows:
Hello
Just received my Apple MC226LL/A MacBook Pro core 2 duo 2.8ghz “4”gb from this homepage , www. leocrv.com It’s so cheaper but genuine , I like it very much ,I paid it $740US couier charges included , They have some other products. If you want to get one. you can check it out .
Hope everything goes well
The subject is “Hello” or even blank. There may be other variations as well. If this happens to you we recommend that you change your passwords for all online accounts. The reason for that is often when you sign up for something you are sent an email containing your username and password. I don’t know about you, but I don’t erase my email very often.
Also you may want to take advantage of your 3 free credit reports a year, if you don’t already.
If you have a Hotmail account and everything looks ok, change your password and backup your contacts just to be safe.
