Has my gmail been hacked?

dulpit

So the last couple of days I've been receiving the odd e-mail that look to have been coming from different friend's e-mail addresses, with the topic of "Dear friend!". The text of the e-mail is:

<DIV>Dear friend,<BR>I am willing to give you a big surprise. I found
a website:  www.>weblink>.com last week. They mainly sell phones ,
laptops, tvs ,digital cameras and motorbikes. I ordered a tv . now I
have got the product after 5 days. Its quality is very good.<BR>By the
way, they only sell new and original products and their products have
international warranty. Now , they are promoting their products, so
the prices are very competitives. If you need these products, you can
have a look. Don not miss the good chance !<BR>Best wishes! </DIV>

Now today, I have a few e-mails in my account that are bounce back e-mails that were sent to addresses that are no longer valid, and it would appear that everyone in my address book received that above e-mail..


So my question is, has my e-mail account been hacked or something??

AnonoBoy

Yes it looks like it has.

Change your password immediately.

Look through your sent mails - you'll probably see about 7 to 10 spam emails that were sent from your account each with a huge string of recipients.

That one has been doing the rounds a lot lately. I know a good few people who had their accounts hacked.

Might be a good idea to change your password on other sites too if you use the same one with your email as your username.

Colonel_McCoy

probably there has been issues with gmail being hacked over the last few weeks

dulpit

Well bugger anyways...

hinduhamster

I got this email from a friends email too,

I looked at the mail but didn't click on anything at all (just sent to bin in Gmail)

So far I my acc has not sent out any of these mails. Is that what the problem is.....clicking on the weird link?

AnonoBoy

hinduhamster wrote: »

I got this email from a friends email too,

I looked at the mail but didn't click on anything at all (just sent to bin in Gmail)

So far I my acc has not sent out any of these mails. Is that what the problem is.....clicking on the weird link?

I don't know. I think they may have phished people's email and password from a social networking site and they relied on people using the same password for everything. I think the site they link to is probably just a dodgy site selling cheap ****ty merchandise but I could be wrong. Haven't clicked it myself.

hinduhamster

I'll keep an eye on my account anyway and might change my password just to be safe.

Guess I better let my friend know that I got his weird mail off him.

Thanks for the help AnonoBoy.

Orion

This happened to my sister today. She's under the impression that there's a back door in googletalk ... anyone heard of that?

I've advised the usual - change password, ensure av and spyboy/adaware are up to date, run full scan. Just in case this is more accurate than google/MS's version if events.

Amalgam

I use Google, doesn't it have a double password, there's also a feature where any change of password can be sent to a phone only.

cruizer22b

That exact same email was sent from my email account on tuesday. Better change my password.

madmoe

I had Gmail account hacked by a spammer yesterday and its now disabled :-( (e-mail sent is below) I hope to hell they re-enable it. This is the second time in less than a month that it was taken over and used to send spam!!!

Anyone know any Google poster's here on boards.ie that I could ask? I done nothing wrong and did not violate Google's terms and service.

Cheers,
M

<DIV>Dear friend<BR>hi,  I bought a laptop from a website: <A href="http://www.>weblink>.com">www.>weblink>.com</A&gt; last week. I have got the product. Its quality  is very good and the price is competitive. They also sell phones, TV, psp, motor and so on. By the  way, they import product from Korea and sell new and original products. They have good reputation and  have many good feedbacks. If you need these products, look at this website will be a clever choice. I  am sure you will get many surprise and benefits. <BR>Greetings!</DIV>

conolan

Just got the same email from my niece. Her account is hotmail.

sceptre

Guys, you realise that when you repost their web address you're giving the spammers more of what they want?

Well you do now:)

I've edited out the actual links. Let's be smart on the Internet or at least smarter than reposting spam links on boards.

It's rare that I'm even tempted to use the rolleyes smiley...

ve

While you're changing your passwords (to something good), also take a look at your Gmail Filters in settings. There was a XSS attack there a while ago that added filters to people's accounts, so password changes on their own didn't keep the attackers at bay for long. Anyway that was about 2 years ago, so this attack may be different, but worth a check no less.

At the time I think the problem came from people visiting hacked eBay profile pages with Gmail open in another browser tab. Haven't been attacked myself (yet!, /touch wood), but loads of people are being or have been hit by this sort of attack.

Best of luck

madmoe

One week on and my Gmail account is still disabled!!

Matt Bauer

madmoe wrote: »

I had Gmail account hacked by a spammer yesterday and its now disabled :-( (e-mail sent is below) I hope to hell they re-enable it. This is the second time in less than a month that it was taken over and used to send spam!!!

It's not Google's fault you handed over your Gmail account details to scammers. Gmail was never "hacked", rather people handed over their passwords voluntarily or had spyware/trojans installed on their Windows PC's that sniffed out the passwords and sent it to the spammers.

madmoe

There should be some way for them to be contacted at least!

Cabaal

Macros42 wrote: »

This happened to my sister today. She's under the impression that there's a back door in googletalk ... anyone heard of that?

crap to be honest, no such issue exists

tpotter

When this happens, in addition to changing your password, it is also very important to look through your settings to see if anything has been changed. Often, a popular trick is to set up a forward, so that all or some mail is forwarded to the 'hackers' address. If this is the case, even if you change your password, your account is still compromised.

In Gmail, goto: Settings->Forwarding and Pop/Imap

Check and make sure that Forwarding is set to disabled or it is only forwarding to address's that you own.

As others have stated, it is not usually that you got hacked, but that the integrity of your password was compromised. Often this is because the same password is used across different services, such as using the same password for boards.ie as you do for the gmail account associated with it or a keylogger is installed on a computer you use.

madmoe

Its a pure ba**s to be honest! If only they would re-enable it and I could reset the password....sigh!!

seamus

This is a big lesson for people: Have one password for your email account and another password for anything else. Actually, keep multiple passwords, but the most important thing is to never sign up to anything using your email address and the same password that you use to access your email account. Otherwise you've basically given the person who owns the site, your email address and the password to access that account.

Other sites may also rely on some very simple hacks, for example if you use Gmail, you'll often be logged automatically into Gmail whenever you go to http://mail.google.com

Someone with a good knowledge of how Gmail works could embed an AJAX request which instructs your browser to connect to gmail and send an email to all of your contacts. The site you're on doesn't need to get any information from Gmail, it only wants to send mails. This can occur in the background, while you're browsing and you won't even notice.

Any good browser should block these kinds of calls, but it's sneaky and doesn't even require access to your email account.