Forum Discussion

laxislife's avatar
laxislife
New Contributor
7 years ago

spam emails from my contacts

Okay this is more about email than internet, but I have been receiving spam emails from fake emails from my contacts, (like the emails are untraceable, and the spelling of my name and the senders name are misspelled versions of the real names as if a robot or foreigner is trying to spell). Each email usually looks like this:

"Hello (my name), I found something very interesting for you (link to some website labeled 'detailed info')

Sorry for the monkey thumbs,

(Signed from misspelled contact name)"

Is my account hacked? What do i do? I don't know how they got my contact info and my name?

side note: the fake emails are both "sent from" athletic trainers I had in high school. 

email
hackers
spam
  • BinAZ's avatar
    BinAZ
    New Contributor II
    7 years ago

    I am having the exact same problem, laxislife. I'm going to guess that the Cox server was hacked based on the fact that webmail has been down, and prior to this, I have never received one spam email in my inbox. 

    • theguru0's avatar
      theguru0
      New Contributor
      7 years ago

      We've been having this problem as well.  I get SPAM from a few of the people that send email regularly to me.  One or two letters have been changed, normally consonants.  I find it odd that this is happening because we are very careful with stuff and am pretty sure we've not been hacked.  Our contacts live in outlook.com and are under two factor auth with a long password.

      You think that Cox's server have been compromised?

  • yak's avatar
    yak
    Contributor III
    7 years ago

    If they had hacked into your account, the spam would be going out from "you" to all of your contacts.   Since you are receiving the spam, it is more likely that one of your friends had their account invaded.  These spammers don't want to "hack" an account.  They mostly want the contact list since friends are more likely to open emails from friends.  They don't send the spam from the account they invaded; they manually enter the trusted name into their Reply address... and send it from their computer. 

      • yak's avatar
        yak
        Contributor III
        7 years ago

        They can get your contact list in several ways.  They can set their computer to "force" your password.  Their account tries thousands of password combinations until one works.  Or they can send you an email asking for you to click on a link... and the link gets them into your email. Or they get into the entire email system which happened to a major email provider in 2014. Or they get into your friend's account and open one of your emails to the friend that is copied to many people.... they scrape all of the addresses.  

        But you said that "both" of the spam senders were your trainers.  If the spammers had gotten into your account they would not have stopped at 2 people. They send an email from every single contact on your account.  In hopes that you open one of them.  Or they send out a spam to everyone on your contact list.  Anyway, I don't think that your account is in any danger.  To make sure, you can change your password.