Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Scary morning

Hi everyone,

Somewhat scary morning so far.

At 8:30 this morning I was checking messages on the practice e-mail, which is a Hotmail account. (Our office manager/biller, who is the only other person who uses this account, is off sick today. It is accessed from three computers, my desktop, my laptop, and office managers desktop.) After the screen refresh, it showed four "delivery failure"messages. I thought this was odd. One minute later, with the next refresh, there were about nine more. I did not recognize the addresses to which these were being sent, they were all Hotmail accounts. In the next minute there were about six more. I started to get that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I turned my computer off, accessed the account from my laptop, there were more delivery failure messages. I turned this computer off, went to office managers computer, numerous more delivery failure messages, I turned that one off.

I went back to my desktop, restarted it, tried to log back into Hotmail, Microsoft sent a message that it appeared that the account had been compromised, and to change the password. I did so, and opened one of the delivery failure messages. Message was

"Find attached transfer copy. We have finally wired the balance payment to your account today. Please confirm from your bank and proceed with shipment in less than two days. We await your confirmation of payment."

The sender was "Accounts department, Mogens Pedersen Changzhou"

Initially I was concerned that there was spyware on one of our PCs. I'm now guessing that it was hacked from China. Computers are Windows 7, Microsoft Security Essentials is the only antivirus. I updated and I'm running MSE scan on the computers.

I'm going to go back and look at the "strong passwords" threads again, any other thoughts as to what happened or what to do?

Thanks.

Gene

Yuck. The hackers often are not going into email through front door but by hiding exploits in email attachments. So a message with an attachment that may be from someone you know and trust (unbeknownst to them) may have something sour inside; they tend to come in spurts, sometimes with links. Unless you know the person and are waiting for an attachment, don't open it, and don't click on the link without due diligence.

Sorry for your troubles. I have also learned the hard way.

Had that same problem with my Hotmail account. If you look at the header of the email you will see the email addresses of others that you or the person using that computer sometimes send emails to. If you call these people you will find out that they are getting the same email messages. I was told that there is usually one main email account that is used and other email accounts from that computer(previously sent emails, outlook addresses from that computer) are hijacked and the messages are sent to them. This will be a recurrent event and you will get the same message from Microsoft a few times in the future. The best thing is to delete the account and start another account.