Yahoo Account hacked!

[PinkJade]

I know this doesn't really pertain to this board, but I am having a hard time finding anyone that knows anything about this and hoped maybe someone could help.

Yesterday my Yahoo! account was hacked into and they sent messages to several of the people in my address book (but not all of them). The email was something along the lines that I was in Nigeria for a work conference and all of my money got stolen and I needed $812 to get home and could they help. There wasn't a link or anything in the email and I can't figure out the purpose of sending it.

I was able to contact Yahoo! by telephone and get the information that was changed fixed and get a new password.

Does anyone know how they could have gotten into my account, why they sent the email, if I should close the account, or if there is anything else I need to worry about?

I scanned the computer for virus and there are none and I have the most up to date VirusScan and Firewall.

Thank you so much.

 

[jfulcer]

Well, was your password easy to guess? They can try over and over to get your password and you're none the wiser. Make sure all your online passwords have letters and numbers and no real words in them and this will help.

Secondly, if they didn't just guess the password it most likely is not a virus that could have given them information about your yahoo account. It could be something called a 'key logger' that gets installed on your machine and sends all keystrokes that you type to the thief. I would recommend that you find a friend that's local that can scan your machine for something like this. Other symptoms could be unexplained slowness, new programs installed that you don't know about, and various other things. I would not do any online banking on your machine until you have the situation looked at. If you have another computer you can change those passwords on, I'd do that also.

 

[PinkJade]

Thanks for your help!

The password was not the greatest. I was thinking that someone probably figured out the password somehow and then changed all of my personal information and password so that I couldn't log back in. They left the messages that they sent in the sent box so I was able to see the IP address that they sent them from and looked it up and it was in Nigeria.

I have let Yahoo! know about the problem and other than that I have gone through and made all my passwords a lot better. I have scanned my computer several times, cleared out the cache and deleted all cookies.

I guess I just am confused about why they sent the messages and what they were hoping to accomplish. The thought of identity theft is so scary to me and I guess it really was a wake up call to me to be a lot more careful. Hopefully they did not get any of my personal information!