Full repercussions of getting email hacked?

I've been hacked once. I used a tertiary email (not throwaway, but not used for personal or day to day stuff), and I made the mistake of using it, and the same password on some shitty forum.

I bet it gets a lot of people. That's probably what happened for you too.

Assuming you don't randomly connect to open, unsecured wireless networks, and proceed to log in to accounts from that network; it sounds like you're taking good, reasonable, safety steps. Your scans are coming up clean, your connection sounds well secured, though if you want to err on the side of caution: check your router, and make sure any default wireless options are disabled (or at least properly secured) and the logs are clean.

The easiest area you could improve upon (without impacting ease & usability) is changing accounts, that allow it, to 2 step authentication -- something either requiring a text msg to phone, or a B.Net type authenticator when you try to login with a password.

Additionally, you could look into compartmentalizing your email & connected accounts further. Banking (and other areas that can be ruined and be worth years of work) should get dedicated passwords AND email addresses.

Personally, I have three emails that aren't throw-away quality, one for banking/taxes/etc, one for daily emails with people I know and game accounts with billing, and one for game forums, signing up for stuff. Never reuse passwords for the first, really shouldn't with the 2nd, and 3rd, it's a question of ease/laziness. In my case, I gambled and lost once. Worst case that one gets breached, it's compartmentalized to whatever is attached to that email.

the mass emails aren't usually someone breaking into your gmail, but instead a worm/trojan temporarily hijacking your gmail session to send out a bunch of email. so you login to gmail, then in another window log into site X which has an ad iframe that runs a zero day exploit that is able to make a new gmail session and send out a bunch of email, the email itself has a link usually to the malware page so all your contacts also get hit.

first, stop using IE its a piece of shit as far as security goes. I'd get chrome, its fast and honestly you won't even notice the change after a few days. Firefox is a bit bloated at this point and not that safe either. Use the chrome extension AdBlock too.

second, think about using something like Keepass or Lastpass or one of the other million apps/websites to let you generate a unique password per webpage.

And yeah, gmail allows 2 step auth so you can turn that on if you are worried. I also keep two seperate gmails, one for all the random internet shit and one just for bank/finances/etc, with the chrome extension x-notifier you can have a hundred gmail accounts checked every X minutes and one click access to them.

the digital world is pretty fucked up and its only a matter of time before someone goes out and really, really, really fucks with things beyond belief - trillions in simultaneous fake wall street trades, trillions of money moved around banks, etc. People in the future are going to look back at how we treat security and think we're all retarded.

I actually had the same thing happen to me a few days ago on one of my yahoo throwaways that still has me scratching my head. I tend to use a different account for different things (one for FTP games, one for more serious titles, one for websites, one for more serious registrations), I use different passwords that mostly consist of 15+ characters including caps, symbols, and numbers taken from a random generator, and almost every single game I've ever played has utilized a different pw. I have never lost an account to hacking or been compromised before. I keep Firefox, Flash, MS Essentials, ect all up to date.

Yet the account that "supposedly" got hit was my social account that is the least utilized and most protected. I checked the IP settings on Yahoo and the only IP that ever used that account was my own and they all link up to dates and times that I usually access the account. The spam I supposedly sent only included two people on my contact list that have been there for a year or so and several family members of mine that I don't ever remember emailing or adding to my contacts list (we certainly don't stay in touch or communicate by email either). If I ever did email them it was 2+ years ago easy and it wasn't more than 1 email each in total ever. None of my newer contacts were targeted or hit.

When I checked the origin/sent IP under the email headers though some listed some area in Russia as the emails point of origin, so I'm starting to wonder if I was never directly compromised but indirectly through yahoo being hacked/compromised and having the hacker forge emails and send them back or something along those lines. The support email I got back was just a generic "sorry change your pw".

Anyway, Yahoo is shit and supposedly this type of crap has been happening for a long time now and Yahoo has known about it and failed to let anyone know, according to this random article I googled up when I got hit:http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/0...ing-incidents/


I scanned using the same programs as you, ran CCleaner,and nothing came up. Although to be fair I'm not sure how good MS Essentials is anyway and it could still be my fault. Ended up throwing on NoScript (don't know why I didn't have it on to begin with), changed all my passwords, deleted all my contacts, and sometime this week when I get enough spare time I'll rescan using NIS or something, move all my shit to a new provider, close the Y Accounts, and change pw's again because having yahoo is still an invitation to be fucked up the ass at some point.

I've seen what spronk describes before and I would bet that's what happened to you but even so switch to Gmail and use two factor authentication. I've got far too much important information to take my email security lightly. I use an ancient Hotmail account for stuff I absolutely don't care about but need to sign up for. I have a yahoo account for most of my regular usage and if that gets hacked all you're getting is my edible flowers account or forums.

My Gmail got hacked once. I never used the account except for my Blizzard stuff - I sent it all there. So no one hijacked my session. One day my WoW account got hacked, so I went onto my email to find it too had been hacked. The person sent out a ton of weird shit and it said it was logged in from China - same as my battle.net account. I shamefully used the same password for both. Not sure how it happened.

I used Microsoft Security Essentials for about 6 months, and got 2 different Trojans/Viruses that it never even remotely detected. Switched back to Avast antivirus and it detected them immediately on the first scan (MSE was still detecting nothing).

I would not recommend Microsoft Security Essentials, there are better free antivirus programs out there.

I tend to find no av's work 100% of the time as the definitions can't keep up with risks that pop up. When someone brings me a compromised machine I'll run a few different scans (tdsskiller, combofix, mwb, spybot) until things seem back to normal.

I had the same thing happen with my yahoo account last week. My wife told me she had received some spam/virus type email from me. The really odd thing was it had been so long since I had logged in to that yahoo account that yahoo had sent my gmail a notice that I needed to log in soon or it would go inactive. The email was sent before that notice....

Our office got hit, I believe this was the way they did it:

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/wh...cked-1B8219490

Luckily we caught it inside of 20 minutes so the amount of spam was pretty low.

spronk_sl said:

the mass emails aren't usually someone breaking into your gmail, but instead a worm/trojan temporarily hijacking your gmail session to send out a bunch of email. so you login to gmail, then in another window log into site X which has an ad iframe that runs a zero day exploit that is able to make a new gmail session and send out a bunch of email, the email itself has a link usually to the malware page so all your contacts also get hit.

first, stop using IE its a piece of shit as far as security goes. I'd get chrome, its fast and honestly you won't even notice the change after a few days. Firefox is a bit bloated at this point and not that safe either. Use the chrome extension AdBlock too.

Click to expand...

Chrome is actually the most resource intensive browser. While Chrome's sand boxing does make it a little more difficult for hackers as they need to chain vulnerabilities, Firefox's security is generally pretty good. Realistically however the most common vectors tend to be plugins, why exploit one browser when you can exploit them all?

My general advice:
- disable any browser plugin you aren't certain you use
- Firefox's flashblock extension or enable Chrome's click to run (both of these will occasionally break websites that rely on some sort of JS <-> plugin communication)
- Adblock+ normal + privacy list

Also check the yahoo settings for third part permissions. This last week two people in my fantasy football league had their emails hacked and when checking into it they saw the login was through a third party permission (number fire most likely in this case).

You are probably going to be at the receiving end of some trojan/malware/exploit eventually regardless of what browser or AV software you run. Your best bet is to accept that and deal with it.

1) As mentioned before, always use 2 factor authentication for your email accounts.
2) If you are paranoid, do all your web browsing inside a virtual machine.
3) If you are really paranoid, do your web browsing on a separate computer (preferably on a separate virtual or physical network).

As I see it, (1) is something that everyone should do. The other two may be too much of a hassle for the average user. Personally I do all "risky" web browsing on a secondary computer that I never use for anything important. That feels like a reasonable compromise.

Had my ebay hacked, I guess the guy bought a whole bunch of shit using my paypal. I never saw a single dime taken from my account and ebay locked him out pretty much immediately. It compromises a lot, like my email account and some other stuff, but pretty swift service on ebays part.

Best thing you can do is use an auto password program like RoboForm. Not only will it create unique and complex passwords for each website, it will auto-fill the password fields on websites. So why is this useful? Well, malware grabs your passwords via keystrokes and since RoboForm fills these fields automatically there are no keystrokes involved.

Best things you can do to mitigate both infection and transmission are the following:

1) Run an AV program (duh) though to be honest my experience is that these are hopeless at stopping the initial infection
2) Block all outbound ports on your router that are not in use. In other words, just leave 80,443, 53 and your torrent ports open
3) Use RoboForm for al password protected websites
4) Occasionally close all open programs and run TCPeye and see if you have any connections open to IP's listed as originating in foreign countries.

I guess in my case the crazy thing is I haven't logged into ebay since 2008, must be some shit luck on my part.