35 fake emails?

@ctryhnny (3460)
United States
March 15, 2013 4:36pm CST
When I got back from being out this morning I logged into my yahoo account to check my email. There were 35 emails that were mailer daemons (sp?). Emails were sent to all my friends and family and yahoo said they came from Brazil and I needed to change my password so it wouldn't happen again. I knew something was wrong when it said 35 emails in my inbox! I didn't understand what was going on until I got the message from yahoo saying my account was accessed from something other than my pc and it was from Brazil! How do these things happen? How could someone from Brazil possibly get into my account? Has this ever happened to you? When I saw Brazil the first thing that came to my mind was mylot since there are people here from all over the world.
1 person likes this
4 responses
@smacksman (6053)
15 Mar 13
Sadly you invited the hacker in without knowing it. You must have opened an email that looked like from a friend of yours and that had the trojan in it. The trojan then reads your address book and sends itself to all your contacts - and so on. So the email you got wasn't from your friend but just from their infected computer. Change your password and download a program called Malwarebytes (its free) and run that on your computer and it will get rid of the trojan. There is a lot of it going about at the moment.
1 person likes this
@ctryhnny (3460)
• United States
16 Mar 13
I already have a malware program installed on my pc and it usually tells me it has gotten rid of certain things. I guess this just got past it.
@suspenseful (40193)
• Canada
16 Mar 13
I am writing a novel and I belonged to a private critique group and yet I have seen emails with the name of my character in it as well as my alias. I have not had what had happened to you, but it does happen that these hackers may pretend to be legitimate businesses and get your email that way. You have to change your password, but not through the email because that email may have come from the hacker. Do it the normal way.
@ctryhnny (3460)
• United States
16 Mar 13
I'm not sure what you mean by the normal way. I changed it through yahoo because of the email they sent me to do so.
1 person likes this
@suspenseful (40193)
• Canada
16 Mar 13
I go through the main yahoo site instead of changing it through the email. The reason is that the yahoo email site may have been spammed.
• Valdosta, Georgia
15 Mar 13
I had this happen to me not long ago. It was my gmail account, I had to change my password and the hacker was apparently in Japan! There are ways for it to be done as others told me in my discussion... There are certain devices hackers can use to get your information. People here said it is actually not hard for hackers to get into our emails!
@ctryhnny (3460)
• United States
16 Mar 13
In all my years on the internet this has never happened to me. I think it's scary that these things can happen. Luckily yahoo was on top of it and knew what happened telling me to change my password.
• United States
26 Mar 13
I have had this happen to me as well. My yahoo account sent out emails to all my contacts trying to get everyone to go to a website. Hackers like to try and put a bit of code onto websites that will send out something like a keylogger or some other type of program that helps hackers get into your email account and send itself out to infect as many computers as it can. This is often how computer viruses work too. I was happy that Yahoo alerted me to this so that I could change my password so that this unauthorized use of my account was stopped.