Has Boards been hacked again

Hotfail.com

Billy86 wrote: »

That, and the fact they came from _____@Hotfail.com email addresses.

I needed to do something to keep myself occupied....

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Gordon

Why do you think it's from boards?

If it got sent to the email that you use boards with, it is possibly scraped from the web. I googled your email addy and it's quite obviously showing on a website. I think you can guess which one if you remember the email addy you used.

Dades

When you hear hoofbeats, don't think zebras.

Black Swan

Hootanany wrote: »

Has Boards been hacked again... Loads of stupid emails at the moment anyone else getting these.

Doubt that boards has been hacked again. For over a year I've had a separate dedicated email account that I use only for boards, and it has never had spam or any emails except those that I've received from boards Admin services.

seamus

Hootanany, when you start receiving bouncebacks for mails you didn't send, it usually means that your email account has been hacked and someone is sending mails from your account.

Microsoft accounts in particular are constantly being hacked into - outlook.com, live.com, msn.com, msn.co.uk, live.co.uk, hotmail.com

LoLth

seamus wrote: »

Hootanany, when you start receiving bouncebacks for mails you didn't send, it usually means that your email account has been hacked and someone is sending mails from your account.

not necessarily true. the more likely explanation is that someone is sending emails pretending to be the victim and the victim's email address is receiving the NDRs. The email address can be found by using web crawlers to "scrape" web pages for any text that matches an email address format. I did a quick google on Hootanany's email and found 7 sites where the email address was printed in plain text, several of them obvious targets for a harvester. As Gordon pointed out, its pretty obvious. (I'm actually shocked it hasnt happened sooner!)

sorry if you were joking, I honestly cant tell.

Microsoft accounts in particular are constantly being hacked into - outlook.com, live.com, msn.com, msn.co.uk, live.co.uk, hotmail.com

I'd love to see some statistics on that statement because , while it could be true, I'm not 100% sure that it is. Is that based on fact or just the fact that they are online emails owned by Microsoft (honest question, a lot of people have a bias , possibly deserved, against Microsoft that leads them to automatically assume anything produced by that company is less secure than any alternative)?

if it is constantly hacked , is it targeted more or less than gmail? Or yahoo ? or facebook? what is the percentage of successful attempts on each of those services? what about Snapchat? twitter?

Is Microsoft account security inherently worse than other online mail providers?

seamus

LoLth wrote: »

not necessarily true. the more likely explanation is that someone is sending emails pretending to be the victim and the victim's email address is receiving the NDRs. The email address can be found by using web crawlers to "scrape" web pages for any text that matches an email address format. I did a quick google on Hootanany's email and found 7 sites where the email address was printed in plain text, several of them obvious targets for a harvester. As Gordon pointed out, its pretty obvious. (I'm actually shocked it hasnt happened sooner!)

In my experience, providers are usually pretty good at filtering out these NDRs where the original mail was obviously spoofed.
That's not to say it's not the reason, I just haven't seen these appear in an inbox in a long time.

I'd love to see some statistics on that statement because , while it could be true, I'm not 100% sure that it is. Is that based on fact or just the fact that they are online emails owned by Microsoft (honest question, a lot of people have a bias , possibly deserved, against Microsoft that leads them to automatically assume anything produced by that company is less secure than any alternative)?

Pure anecdotal. Anyone who has ever said to me, "My email was hacked", has been an owner of one of these accounts.
By contrast, I've never heard of someone with a Gmail account being hacked.

But like I say, purely anecdotal. I wouldn't for a second imply that MS systems are inherently less secure, it's more likely that less tech-savvy people tend to have these kinds of accounts and by extension use weaker passwords and/or security questions and/or will fall victims to phishing attacks.

Hands up who wishes they knew hootanany's email address?

o/

Hootanany

LoLth wrote: »

not necessarily true. the more likely explanation is that someone is sending emails pretending to be the victim and the victim's email address is receiving the NDRs. The email address can be found by using web crawlers to "scrape" web pages for any text that matches an email address format. I did a quick google on Hootanany's email and found 7 sites where the email address was printed in plain text, several of them obvious targets for a harvester. As Gordon pointed out, its pretty obvious. (I'm actually shocked it hasnt happened sooner!)

sorry if you were joking, I honestly cant tell.



I'd love to see some statistics on that statement because , while it could be true, I'm not 100% sure that it is. Is that based on fact or just the fact that they are online emails owned by Microsoft (honest question, a lot of people have a bias , possibly deserved, against Microsoft that leads them to automatically assume anything produced by that company is less secure than any alternative)?

if it is constantly hacked , is it targeted more or less than gmail? Or yahoo ? or facebook? what is the percentage of successful attempts on each of those services? what about Snapchat? twitter?

Is Microsoft account security inherently worse than other online mail providers?

Should I be worried?