I think I have been hacked

[JOhnH]

I have a generic email address that my receptionists use to communicate with clients. All three of them have the password.
Last night we received an email, apparently from our self that we have been subpoenaed to a court in Portugal. The email was in Portuguese, but that is what Google Translate told us.

I immediately changed the password. This email account gets accessed from various workstations, including the receptionists home computers when they work from home.

Other than changing the password (done) and running our virus software (will happen today), is there anything else I need to be aware of, or do?

 

[EdFred]

It's easy to spoof an email address without hacking.

I can send you an email right now and make it look like it is from yourself without knowing your password. Happens all the time.

 

[Matthew]

Check to see if there is a list of recipients that may also have gotten it. You can look at the header information to see who actually sent it, probably not you. If the list of other people who got it contains only your contacts, maybe you didn't get hacked, maybe your ISP did.

 

[timwinters]

It's easy to spoof an email address without hacking.

I can send you an email right now and make it look like it is from yourself without knowing your password. Happens all the time.

^^^this^^^

I'm no IT guy but I frequenly get spam from me. I hate me when I'm a spammer. Me sucks. :wink2:

 

[JOhnH]

^^^this^^^

I'm no IT guy but I frequenly get spam from me. I hate me when I'm a spammer. Me sucks. :wink2:

But when I looked at the full header (which I admit is advanced beyond my knowledge), the sender still showed as my email address. Usually when I get this kind of email, the sender appears different in the full header than in the visible "from:" field.

 

[EdFred]

Yes, the sender can still show as you in the header without knowing your password.

 

[Fredbob711]

Yep, we used to mess with people at my old job by sending them e-mails from 'random' e-mail addresses including themselves because we were one of the few groups in the company that had access to the corporate SMTP server.

One of the senior directors didn't believe it, so one of his employees went to his desk and sent the senior director an e-mail from our VP saying he was fired.

 

[FredFenster]

Just wait until a couple hundred people reply to your email address asking to be removed from the list or with nasty notes. Happened to me last year. By the third day I was tempted to start replying to some of them.

 

[Henning]

If you changed your password, you should quit getting spam from yourself, unfortunately, everyone on your contacts list got spammed by you as well. I had this happen before. If your email address is through your website domain, you want to right now look at your current registration status, because someone may have your domain. I had a big CF over that.

 

[Matthew]

Something happened to my Yahoo account a couple years ago. Now, about every 6 months, a spam gets sent to me and about 10-15 of my contacts. It says it's from me, too. Many of those contacts I deleted about a year ago, and at least one of them was in my contact list for only a very short time. So I have a general idea of when my contact list was stolen. When I look at the header info, I usually see a French address. Somewhere, somehow, someone stole my contact list -- maybe during one of many Yahoo break-ins. My own spam filter handles the spam to myself, but then one or more of my contacts will always be sure to let me know they got something from me. The contacts that get this spam are not a group that I would have included together on a single email, so it's not like someone intercepted an email of mine and then got the names of the recipients.

I'm about to go ahead and use a different email and tell everyone to filter anything from my old one so that I can start over, but this particular address is one I use for a lot of different things and I haven't decided yet if it's worth the trouble to delete it.