Scary Email scam

[Nightryder]

A call from my daughter in Tasmania early this morning, both she & her mother in law had received an email from me saying that I was in scotland,that I was their to visit a Researchers complex & that I had been mugged at gun point had no money or credit cards & to send money (1450 pounds)to a western union account that appears to be in my name, it looks like my google mail account has been hacked & im guessing this email has gone out to everyone on my contacts list,logging on to facebook last night that account had been hacked as well, I do have security on my pc & this is the first time ive had a problem,logging on to the forum to post this warning i find someone on the forum has already received this email, I do apologise to everyone who receives it.




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[Procat]

Hi Nightryder,

No need to apologise. It is not your fault this has happened. A similar thing happened to a work colleague a few weeks ago.

[Barnzzz]

Hi Nightryder, this seems to happen a lot. My email account was hacked a couple of weeks ago and everyone got an advert 'from me' for shoes or handbags or something similar. The email sent to your contacts hits a new low though. It seems that whatever security we have on our PCs we're never completely safe.
Sue

[Nightryder]

Thank you Procat,I just feel awful about it.
Barnzz, I thought my pc was secure ive never had a problem before, I use on line banking & I did contact the bank this morning, but they tell me their security on the website is very good but that If they had managed to access my account & taken money out the bank would have covered it, ive also set up sms alerts If their is any unusual activity on my account the bank will send me a text to verify it is me,what a brilliant idea.

[Nightryder]

This just gets worse, When I changed my face book password,facebook send an email, its been changed again & I cant log in, I dread to think what might be being posted in my name, all emails to me from contacts that have received the scam email are going straight to my spam folder,the first one came from my brother,when I tried to email a reply I find all my family & friends email addresses Have been deleted.

[Procat]

Hi,

Have you scanned your computer for viruses and bots? There may be something lurking there.

[RonOne]

it looks like my google mail account has been hacked

If you scroll down to the bottom of the Main Page of your Google Mail you should see something like:
Last account activity: 20 minutes ago on this computer. Details

Clicking - Details - should show if your account has been opened in any other location (along with the - IP address - and time)

[MarkJ]

Wonder if this was a simple password guess or a keylogger? Assuming Nightryder has a good Av/malware protection on her computer, then a keylogger or simply a guessed password is the issue?

Perhaps a good time to remind us all that we should choose good, strong passwords - which are different for each different account we have on various sites. Not that I am suggesting Nightryder has an easy to guess password or uses the same one for several accounts, but that does make it easy for these miscreants.

How easy it is to do this kind of thing was demonstrated to me by a 12 year old several years ago. I watched this young person take over a chat account - and the associated email account - very easily and it took a couple of minutes. The young person was not a computer wizard, just a normal youngster. The account password was changed - preventing the owner from logging in and then anything could be done from the chat and email.
I did ensure the account was reset the account afterwards by the way! And this was done on an agreed basis for the purposes of demonstration. But it does show how easily it can be done.

There are a few phishing tricks out there at the moment, which claim to be from (for example) Gmail etc and ask you to log in on a page which looks like the official one. These steal your password and the misreants will try your username and password on other sites, such as Facebook,Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, etc. Which is why we should use a different username and/or password for each account.

Better to use good passwords - including letters, numbers and symbols - which are impossible to remember easily and write them down in a book, than to use passwords you can remember. It is unlikely someone will steal the book - but very possible that someone will break a simple password! Likewise, a "question and answer" thing to reset your password on various accounts should be obscure. Never choose something simple such as the name of your favourite football team or your pets name - anyone who knows you can easily reset your password by guessing the answer!

Keep your AV software up to date and if you think something seems a bit odd about a site - then it probably is!
If possible, use tools to stop scripts from auto-running (e.g NoScript on Firefox), and never ever open emails which you are unsure about. Better to contact the alleged sender of a suspicious email to see if they did actually send it before opening it.

Sadly, there are a lot of miscreants out there and we all need to be careful.

Mark

[Ted Carpenter]

Hi everyone,
I'm a member of several of these type of forums (is that the correct plural for forum? or is it fora?or forii?)
Anyway, each one of these has reported similar activity and each time it, it seems, that a similar scenario is used, i.e. an e-mail from a known person, using their e-mail addresses, and stating that they've been mugged or robbed an need a "loan", usally a four figure amount, either in USD or £'s, in order to get home from wherever the sender claims to be, and asking you to e-mail back. A minor failing in one case was noticed when an Australian forum member seemingly requested money in order to get back to the USA, and the alarm was raised early.
The caveat from the other forum members was NEVER to respond to these scam e-mails, as that could provide the hacker with the access needed to gain control of your computer.
It seems that forum sites in general are being targetted due to the geographical diversity of membership, however the principal target area seems to point to Australia, and so far any forum feedback suggests that the most likely source is from the US. I shall be keeping a very close eye on how this progresses.
Stay computer safe!! Ted.

[notanotherminer]

If possible, use tools to stop scripts from auto-running (e.g NoScript on Firefox),

Can you elaborate on what that is please Mark? I've been very security conscious ever since my wife's computer got its virus so if there's a little bit of extra protection I can get from Firefox I'd like to get it.

Please bear with one that is still finding out new things about my computer but what do you mean by scripts auto running?