Question I use a Mac and multiple accounts have been compromised... Help!

mozillafirefox1225 · Feb 18, 2015

This month I noticed that an unauthorized payment on my paypal has been made and there are random addresses I have no connection to associated with the account. I settled the resolution with paypal and had my account closed. Today, I received an email from playstation network which I have not used for multiple years that a 0$ transaction was executed... There is a specific email-password combination I used for these accounts and I checked other accounts for which this combination was used and discovered my twitter and some other accounts were compromised. However, my actual email it seems, was not hacked because I used a different password. So I changed the passwords on all of my compromised accounts and I am a mac user. Does this give any suspicion of a virus on the mac like a key logger? And what further steps can I take to further protect? I am concerned because I did install some sketchy software before.

Many Thanks

COLGeek · Feb 18, 2015

Sounds like it is time for a full reinstall of your OS. I would not trust anything on this system at this point.

McHenryB · Feb 19, 2015

No, I don't think this indicates any problem with your Mac. It is more likely that someone has cracked one of your passwords (guessed, brute force, or social engineering) and has then just tried that username/password combination on other accounts.

This is why using the same combination on multiple accounts is such a problem. It normally indicates a password that is easy to remember (thus easy to guess). I find the best policy is to use a password manager (I use LastPass, but there are others) and generate different, complex, random passwords for each account. You can also use two-factor authentication on the password manager to make it more secure from attack.

Unless you have any indication that accounts are still compromised I wouldn't worry about keyloggers, etc. Although they do exist, they are still far rarer on OS X than Windows. If it were a keylogger you would expect more than just the one user/ password combination to be compromised.

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Question I use a Mac and multiple accounts have been compromised... Help!

mozillafirefox1225

Reputable

COLGeek

Cybernaut

McHenryB

Admirable

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