I think my Yahoo account has been hacked!

[Catshrink]

I just check my email and in the past 3 1/2 hours, have had 75 emails. They are all about buying online drugs and are returned to me as undeliverable! It looks like they have been sent from my account.

I sent an email to [e-mail] about it. How worried do I need to be about this?

[WhollyHeretic]

1. Change your password right now

[OhioChick]

2. Just change your password. n/t

[Catshrink]

4. What if they have installed tracking software on my computer?

[OhioChick]

5. Do run any anti-virus software and are the definitions up to date?

Do you only access Yahoo mail through the browser interface?

[Catshrink]

7. Only through the browser...

and I just updated and scanned for viruses yesterday. Just started it again.

[OhioChick]

8. Let it run and you're probably okay...

Just change your password.

[Catshrink]

9. McAfee says there's an error

I clicked fix and McAfee said it couldn't be fixed. OMG, I know better than to panic but yet I am.

[OhioChick]

12. What does it say the error is? n/t

[Catshrink]

17. No but...

I went through all the settings and hit fix again and now it's okay and another scan is running.

No more Yahoo emails so we'll see what happens. Sometimes I hate computers.

Thanks for your suggestions!

[OhioChick]

19. Anytime.

:hi:

[Historic NY]

3. you have a "bot" or "trojian" run your virus scans.

[Catshrink]

6. I just started them.

I scanned yesterday but am doing so again.

[WhollyHeretic]

11. Download malwarebytes and run it. It catches things your anti-virus misses

Here's the link

http://download.cnet.com/Malwarebytes-Anti-Malware/3000-8022_4-10804572.html?tag=mncol

[Duer 157099]

10. I could be wrong, but ...

can't anyone put anything as a return address in an email?

So, your account needn't necessarily have been hacked, just your email addy used as the "from" - right?

[Posteritatis]

13. Changing your PW and doing your scans is most of what you can do there

Contacting Yahoo was good too, in case there's complaints about the outgoing emails from other people. (Not likely, since spam filters are getting pretty good, but still worth considering.)

Do you have an outgoing mail folder there too? You might want to take a look at that, see if anyone you know personally got spammed as a result so you can explain what's up to them.

[BlooInBloo]

14. Google "email spoofing".

[notesdev]

15. get a new account

your email address has been used in a spamming operation; you are listed as the sender of their spam mail. easiest way to deal with it is to get a new account.

[alittlelark]

16. About 3 years ago my acct was hacked and I sent Porn

to MANY people. I found out due to angry e-mails received.

Yahoo suspended the acct and I still use it today.

[Catshrink]

18. Thank you everyone...

I finally got the McAfee errors fixed and am running a deep scan. I'm not sure what was wrong and we'll see what happens.

:mad:

[high density]

20. That's called backscatter

It means a spammer sent out a lot of spam using your email address in the From: field. You wouldn't even know about it if the idiots running the email servers that were sending you the undeliverable notices had configured their email servers properly. No "hacking" needs to go on for this to happen.

[Catshrink]

21. My antivirus scan came back clean

so your response makes a lot of sense. So whew! It sure gave me a start, that's for sure.

[Desperadoe]

22. Check your address book, too

I had this happen to me about two weeks ago and it wiped out my address book, even though it is a web based hotmail account. And yes, you must change your password.