How do spammers get access to my contact list?

Posted by: Peter Dinh on 21 June 2010

Brilliant

. How do they do that? I would like to know.

I have a hotmail account, which I set up about 10 years ago and I do not use it to send emails any more, only for checking messages now and then. However, this account has an outdated contact list, some of which do not exist anymore.

Last night, when I logged in Windows Live to check if I had any new message, to my surprise, there were lots of bounced messages, sent by my own hotmail account to some of the outdated addresses in my contact lits, all of which regarding enlarging my manly beauty and buying cheap Viagra and talking dirty with hot chicks of various nationalities.

You could say that there may be viruses, malware, trojans, or whatever funny stuffs, etc. on my machine, but machine is a Mac and it was turned off during the time this hotmail account was flooded with these junks.

I looked closely at some of these messages and apparently they were from somewhere in Kansas?

Posted on: 21 June 2010 by Peter Dinh

Another thing that has been bothering me is that it could be somebody who managed to log in my hotmail account by breaking or somehow acquiring my own password. Could that be possible?

Anyway, I have just changed my password just in case

Posted on: 21 June 2010 by Mike Hughes

In short you've answered your own question. It can only be one of those things you describe. However, I did allow myself a little mirth at your rather plaintive Mac comment.

Spammers use social engineering. They rely in your lack of nouse. A rock solid indicator of said lack is the failure to understand the distinction between secure and safe. Your Mac may currently be safe. It is not and never has been "secure". If you, fir example, use Safari as your browserr you are inviting someone to eat a meal of your data.

Apologies if you read this as harsh but we are ten years into the 21st century and this sort of stuff has been around at least a decade by now!!!

Good luck with getting it sorted.

Mike

Posted on: 21 June 2010 by TomK

Peter it worries me that here and in at least one other thread you have demonstrated a serious lack of genuine IT knowledge yet you list your occupation as "Banking IT professional". What exactly do you do for a living?

Posted on: 21 June 2010 by Peter Dinh

quote:
Originally posted by TomK:
Peter it worries me that here and in at least one other thread you have demonstrated a serious lack of genuine IT knowledge yet you list your occupation as "Banking IT professional". What exactly do you do for a living?

Out of curiosity, where exactly do I go wrong? I know I am good at what I do but I am happy to learn from you. One never stops at learning, and one never knows everything

Btw, I am using Chrome, I hate Safari. I've never claimed that Mac is safe, and I know where I go and where the limits are.

Posted on: 22 June 2010 by Peter Dinh

Actually, I find it amusing when people talk about security on the Mac & Mac OS. The view of the users on this forum reflects the one from the general public - The Windows camp tend to exaggerate the security problem whereas the Mac fan boys try to minimize it. In fact, in reality 99.999 % of the Macs are safe, the only Trojan problem on the Mac that I have heard of is the self-inflicted wound where some users installed a pirated iLife version.

Having said that, Safari is currently known to have several security holes but surprisingly so far no real attempt has been made to take advantages of these holes.

Posted on: 22 June 2010 by Guido Fawkes

I bet if there was a library of useful bookmarks then somebody would install them in their web browser (be it IE, Chrome, Safari or ...); these would, of course, include www.hatmail.com which goes to Hotmail. You just type in your user name and password and it logs on to hotmail for you. Infact, there is no difference between hatmail.com and hotmail in terms of visual appearance or functionality. So you don't have to log-in repeatedly hatmail.com thoughtful keeps a note of your user name and password. What the hatmail.com folks definitely don't do is use your username and password to log on to your Hotmail account and steal your address book - they are nice people and would never ever do such a thing.

Why do you hate Safari? It is just a web browser, no reason to hate it. OK so it doesn't run on my Amiga, but what does? Viruses can if anybody still bothered to write them.

Posted on: 22 June 2010 by Peter Dinh

Safari is a very quirky browser! In the past, when I had no choice, I had to fix or correct some of them but I could not do it forever, especially now we have Chrome (a gift from God

). When I said no choice for me because I hate Firefox, Camino, Opera, Omniweb, etc. even more.

As a matter of fact, Apple actually brought in some of them in Safari 5. These changes start to make Safari usable for a majority of poor Mac users.

Posted on: 23 June 2010 by TomK

quote:
Originally posted by Peter Dinh:
quote:
Originally posted by TomK:
Peter it worries me that here and in at least one other thread you have demonstrated a serious lack of genuine IT knowledge yet you list your occupation as "Banking IT professional". What exactly do you do for a living?

Out of curiosity, where exactly do I go wrong? I know I am good at what I do but I am happy to learn from you. One never stops at learning, and one never knows everything

Btw, I am using Chrome, I hate Safari. I've never claimed that Mac is safe, and I know where I go and where the limits are.

Hi Peter,
In a previous thread you advised people to reply to spam so it would swamp them but this is just the last thing you should do. Now you seem to be assuming that a Mac and common sense mean no viruses. Not true. And to say you know where you go is like somebody saying I don't plan to meet any sick people so I don't need inoculated against anything.
I'm sure you're careful and I'd love your approach to work but would it cope with, for example, your country's leading academic bookseller having their front page infected for a short time? That happened to me a few years ago. I was checking out the purchase of some books for my department and thankfully our antivirus software warned me. I called them and their web site was down for the next couple of days while they cleaned it up. You can't assume that big respectable sites are immune which is why you must look after yourself.

Good luck. Let's be careful out there

Posted on: 23 June 2010 by Peter Dinh

quote:
Originally posted by TomK:
In a previous thread you advised people to reply to spam so it would swamp them but this is just the last thing you should do.

It was actually a sarcastic comment due to a frustration that we could not and probably never will come up with a satisfactory solution against the spamming / phishing attempts. I was sure you all took it as a pinch of salt.

Antivirus protection is never a good solution because a fix always comes after a new virus is detected. So for now the best thing for ordinary users is to use common sense and to be vigilant.