Id theft/hacking

Have any of you experienced hacking or ID theft re your email accounts?

I thought I was just being paranoid, but now several emails have been coming in from people I've never heard of (at official places like the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs)...

referring to emails that I never sent - apparently some dated from late February this year.

And that was just about the time I started having problems getting into my email accounts (would have to repeat the password several time) and also to FunAdvice.

Any advice or personal experience would be welcome - I feel at a loss!

Obviously, I've changed the passwords now - but what else can I do?

It doesn't sound as though your email was hacked - just spammed.

I know you've been having trouble since your recent upgrade, so that could be what's causing the need to enter your password multiple times.

Keep in mind that spoof emails can be tricky. They make you think the email was sent by you to yourself, or claim that you contacted them first when you didn't. The best thing to do is just empty your junk mail and pay them no heed.

A lot of times the spam emails use what's known as dictionary spam eg, combinging a list of names, numbers, etc to auto generate a list of millions (or billions) of email addresses...so, while they don't have your email or know you who are, by doing the dictionary email spam method, they can guess at a lot of usable email addresses.

One thing I'd add is that there is noting in basic SMTP to prevent anyone from impersonating anyone else. With a little technical knowledge anyone can send emails claiming to be from anyone they wish. If you can get the full headers you can trace its path back to the originating server but there are tricks here to throw people off as well.

Someone doesn't have to use your account to forge email.

I have one email address Ive had for 15 years. Back then nobody worried about people harvesting email addresses (pre-SPAM) so we didn't bother hiding them. I see lots of bounced spam apparently from me but the headers all indicate that they didn't originate from any email server I use.

Digital signatures are the only way to be sure email comes from who it claims to be from.

Thank you, all of you, so much!

Maybe I was over-reacting, but this was the first time I'd ever discovered that someone had apparently sent emails in my name and from one of my email addresses. I know several colleagues have ahd that prblem, but they use a different email system.

And yes, I'll set up a new account - but in fact, the one I use for funadvice doesn't seem to have been affected.

Thanks again!