Somehow someone got hold of all the contacts in my address book on Yahoo mail and sent them 'scam mail' - help!

[HonorMatopoeia]

Thankfully a fellow m'netter told me so I could send a mail to everyone saying not to open the attachment incase it contained a virus.
DH has run a virus check and all seems ok so we think it was a credit card scam as the attachment asked people to put their details in to get special offers on shopping
So now do I have to dump my account? Could this happen again or is it just a one off? How on earth did they send something that was supposed to be from me without their being any record of it my end anyway?

There are two different situations. Suppose your email address is [email protected]

They can simply send out scam emails and put FROM [email protected],in the header and they would appear to be coming from you.

What they do is guess them mostly. So they use [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] etc

However if they really had access to your address book I'd have to think that they knew your yahoo username and password and had full access to your account. They could log on from their own computer then and there wouldn't be anything on your PC to indicate a problem.

You should change the password at least and make it a long complicated one containing letters, numbers and a couple of underline characters because they can use a program to guess them and if you used a short simple word it's too easy.

If you could get hold of one of the emails and examine the headers they contain IP numbers and often the name of the PC used to send the emails.

My friend's yahoo account was scammed recently. I had an email from him offering me a dodgy laptop He changed email accounts.

OMG Greyriverside! Right, I'm off to check the email (another fine m'netter forwarded it to me!) Thank you.
Yes Get back, I'm thinking a change of email account is probably best.

The main thing is to have a long unguessable password.

One method they use is to try a list of common english words and names as password. Lots of people use their childrens names which is dead easy. Other people use simple words such as green, house, donkey or whatever.

Some recommend passwords like this

l3kj4Krh53GtSdfe

but that is too hard to type in every time.

If you use one that's a combination like this

green_19feathers

that's usually good enough since they have to try every possible combination of letters and numbers

Honor - check the list of recipients - are they all from you contacts list?

Greyriverside - I received the e-mail from Honor and there was a long list of recipients - some of which I recognised as we have mutual friends. This suggests that someone really had accessed her address book doesn't it.

I'm afraid it does seem quite likely. A virus/trojan installed on the PC will also do things like that, but Honor says they run a virus check.

I don't use Yahoo. Is this address book on the PC or on the yahoo website or both? I've been assuming it was on the website. If it's only on the PC they would have had to get access to that.

Hi Littlefish - yep, all were my contacts unfortunately, sorry for all the hassle!
Greyriverside - DH says the addresses are on the website. Have changed all my passwords and my email address now. Seems they had also got into my ebay account, although not the card details part, phew! They had, however, sent an email; to a third party - why would they do that?

Don't worry about the hassle! It wasn't any hassle for me!! Glad you've got your new e-mail address sorted.