Spoofed E-mail or something worse?

[Wolfshadw]

Hey all,

For the past few weeks, friends of mine have been receiving spam e-mail, supposedly from me. Looking into it, I found out that my e-mail address is apparently being spoofed.

Here's the odd part. I recently received e-mails from new contacts and the latest "spoofed spam" e-mail included those new contacts

I've scanned my system with Malwarebytes, Spybot: Search and Destroy, AVG Anti-Virus, Zone Alarm Anti-Virus, and Windows Defender. All scans came back empty.

What the hell is going on? How did these new contacts get included in this latest e-mail spoof/spam?

-Wolf sends

P.S. Since that event, I've changed my e-mail account password. We'll see what happen (if anything further).

 

[Tradesman1]

COuld be a few things, changing the password is good, if something like hotmail, gmail, yahoo, they may have simply ran a program trying various passwords, guessed, brute force, there's apparently a number of way, chnging the password is best thing to do.....

 

[ssddx]

by email address do you mean gmail or another popular free online variant? a few of those have been hijacked recently and i myself was subject to it.

apparently i was sending out advertisements on my gmail address without me even knowing it. some guy i talked to on craigslist responded back with a "?" which alerted me to it. apparently he was the only person which is strange for spam email.

i have since bumped up my password security.

before i was using letters and numbers about 10 characters long. i have since bumped up security to around 18 characters long with letters, numbers, capitals and symbols and havent heard anything since.

the password strength i had before could be cracked in 10 days
the password strength i use now can be cracked in 71 quadrillion years (lol...)

according to https://howsecureismypassword.net/

 

[Wolfshadw]

It was my ISP email (Comcast) that was being spoofed/hacked. Not sure what was going on, but since I changed my password, I've not seen or heard of any other spam being sent out.

Password Strength before: 11 days to crack
Password Strength now: 275 days to crack

Nice site there!

-Wolf sends

 

[ssddx]

yeah i found the website while trying to come up with a new password. not sure how accurate it is (lol 71 quadrillion years) but it definitely helps to give you a good feel on what works and what doesnt.

of course if the site gets hacked and your pass gets stolen off the servers in that manner then no manner of security is going to help you.

 

[Wolfshadw]

That's why I didn't use my actual passwords. I just simulated them. Same number of caps, lowercase, numbers, and special keys in the same order as my actual passwords.

-Wolf sends