Club Cobra - Hotmail hacked-craigslist warning

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Hotmail hacked-craigslist warning

So, it finally happened to me, my email address book got snagged at 5:17am this morning and 300+ spam messages went out to my contacts.

How did it happen, it appears that someone sent me a response to a Craigs List post that had a malicious code attached to it. Me opening it up was enough to automatically send the code to work. Took about 5 seconds for me to see a jump in CPU useage, but it was too late. My firewall snapped shut, but the damage has been done for the day, my hotmail account is locked down for the next 24 hours.

I then wiped the system cache, browser cache, and ran three separate programs to check and disinfect my computer (non found).

Next I went in to hotmail and redid all of my passwords, phone contact, challenge questions, etc, user ID has been modified, (subtle so I can see if it happens again or if my email is now in spammer hell as a sent from), password is now 15+ characters long.

So if you got an email from me this morning around 5:17am, do not open it, delete it hard and be done with it.

Let this serve as a warning to others.

Bill S.

Hi Bill

I for one don't understand half of what you did to protect yourself but it sure sounds like you know what you are doing. Email, the internet and all that goes with it are wonderful but the problems that can occur are terrible.

My company laptop was infected with a virus a couple of years ago and ever since then, I never open anything that is the least bit suspicious.

Good luck, let's hope that you have covered all of the bases.

Wayne

I opened up a news story on Yahoo a few months ago and I got hit with 47 viruses. It hit so fast that the virus protection could not keep up with it (according to the IT guy at work). The only way to fix it was to re-format the hard drive and re-install everything. I would like to find these people that do this crap and hang them by their privates.

Bill,

That happened here to a friend of mine. Except his sent out just a link and the link took anyone that clicked on it to a server that had several viruses and Trojans on it. I thought it looked sort of strange so I expanded the headers and sure enough it was someone using his e-mail and they had managed to get that thing into his address book. I won't even open any e-mail that has nothing but a link in it, but I did test it with my virus program and it told me what virus was at that place. I had received 3 of them from him in a day so I called him and he cleaned out everything and it seems to be ok now.

Ron