Email Hacked ?

[hammerman]

Got an email from my dad the other day and in it was a link to someone promoting a site where a woman makes 60,000 dollars a month blah blah.

I thought this was a bit strange as my dad is very wary (he's a retired copper) and believes that if something's too good to be true, it usually is !!!!

Obviously he didn't send the email to me.

Any idea what's happened ? Could it be a security risk to his puter.

many thanks

HM

[SlackAlice]

It suggests his email account has been hacked. At the very least he needs to change his password.

[ummmm]

Yep...like Alice says, change the password.

[dzug2]

His account is not necessarily hacked.

The offending account could be someone else's who had your dad in their address book. Bad guy steals their address book - and hey presto lots of e mail addresses to spam.

If you dad is computer savvy and careful that's a rather more likely scenario - his own account is not at risk

[RATTER15]

But dzug2, that wouldn't explain how the email came from his fathers e mail address.

This could be the result of spam-ware or a virus I imagine on your fathers PC.

[dzug2]

The spammer can put any e-mail address he likes as the sender - it doesn't mean that it came from the dad's account, just that it had been spoofed to appear that it did.

[dzug2]

I'm not saying the account definitely hasn't been hacked - just that there are other, possibly more likely, explanations.

[woofgang]

its called address harvesting...its one reason why if you are forwarding an email, you should clean off all the previous addresses before sending it on, and if you send emails to groups of people, you should create a group in your email program and not put everyone's address on it....at very least add all the addresses in the bcc line and send it to yourself....for the naughty person harvesting is much easier than hacking account by account....harvested addresses are also sold on.

[mushroom25]

regardless of the reason, this particular e-mail seems to be somewhat prevalent as i've received it now from four entirely unrelated (and unknown to each other) sources.