Birds, Leps, Observations & Generalities - the images and ramblings of Mark Skevington. Sometimes.

Friday 30 December 2011

Spammer

Yes - I am still here. I've gone quiet as in between bouts of busyness at work, and aside from glutony, alcoholism and mediating between bickering offspring during the festive period, I've done feck all.


Apologies to anyone on my e-mail circ who received an inbox full of junk mail this morning. Some complete bastard fuckwit hacked into my hotmail account. Not sure how that happened as my home PC is fully protected (and always has been). Maybe my work PC antivirus/security stuff has not been updated over Christmas.


My password was not weak (though maybe not the strongest) with numbers and letters and not including an everyday word, but my biggest sin is using the same password for most on-line stuff (lazy, makes it easy to remember) and never changing it. Most worrying was any potential risk to on-line banking etc. Needless to say I spent time this morning changing passwords. Hopefully sorted now - we'll see.

There's every chance I may even get out some time in January ......

Hopefully going down to the smoke tomorrow for a family day out, so before I go I'll wish everyone a Happy New Bird/Moth/Stuff filled Year.

5 comments:

Stewart said...

Hi Mark, yes I got your Spam :)

Have a great New Year....

Skev said...

Worth a look Stewart if you want cheap IT/gadgets from China ....

Not long after posting, I received the same spam back from another hotmail user. Looks like a hotmail server has been hacked and passwords/account detail gleaned from that.

Happy New Year!

The Leicester Llama said...

I suspect this is actually nothing to do with passwords - surely if a hacker had your password the first thing they would do is change it and lock you out of the account.

This appears to be some sort of address book hack that exploits a security hole in LiveMail or Outlook Express - when you open or reply to one of the 'infected' emails, as I did with yours, it somehow gets access to your contacts and then sends email as you.

This is the first time in ten years of having a Hotmail address that I've had any problems with it, but I'm seriously considering stopping using it now and just using my own domain email.

Alison said...

thank you for a good blog
Happy new year
Alison

Skev said...

Think you are right Andy regarding the passwords bit, the more I think about it. Which is actually better for me as I was concerned about whether the work laptop was part of the problem. Only other aspect though is that I have never knowingly opened or replied to one of the spam e-mails.
First time I've had an issue with hotmail too. My account is working without issue now since I changed password etc yesterday.