# I've been getting styrage emails from peoiple I know--hacked? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 24, 2014, 10:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-been-getting-styrage-emails-from-peoiple-i-know-hacked/699472 "2014-09-24T22:40:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2014, 10:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-been-getting-styrage-emails-from-peoiple-i-know-hacked/699472/1 "2014-09-24T22:40:14Z")
I’ve been getting emails from myself, and from my former therapist. I just changed my email password. I have McAfee Plus, & it says I’m fine. Am I hacked? ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2014, 10:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-been-getting-styrage-emails-from-peoiple-i-know-hacked/699472/2 "2014-09-24T22:55:04Z")
Maybe someone you know (maybe your therapist) has an email virus, and it has got into their address book. How are they strange. ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2014, 11:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-been-getting-styrage-emails-from-peoiple-i-know-hacked/699472/3 "2014-09-24T23:03:49Z")
Some are in Spanish. Others are just a question “How are you” and a link. ---
**Author:** ![Claverhouse](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/13edae/32.png) [@Claverhouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Claverhouse)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2014, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-been-getting-styrage-emails-from-peoiple-i-know-hacked/699472/4 "2014-09-24T23:07:45Z")
Me great-great-great-uncle Paddy had to travel styrage to New York with the pigs. ---
**Author:** ![Doug\_K](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b5ac83/32.png) [@Doug\_K](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doug_K)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2014, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-been-getting-styrage-emails-from-peoiple-i-know-hacked/699472/5 "2014-09-24T23:09:10Z")
The return address on an email is as easy to spoof as writing someone else’s name in the return address spot on a physical envelope. The more likely explanation is that the spammers have lists of email addresses of people who are likely to know each other, and spoof the email addresses accordingly. ---
**Author:** ![drachillix](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/48db29/32.png) [@drachillix](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drachillix)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2014, 11:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-been-getting-styrage-emails-from-peoiple-i-know-hacked/699472/6 "2014-09-24T23:10:13Z")
> [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](#): > > Am I hacked? More likely you are seeing a series of spoofed email headers Someone (say your therapist) picks up a virus that scoops his outlook contact list and sends a link to itself to everyone, then starts sending copies of the same kind of crap to everyone else on the list, as everyone else on the list in turn. Some probably are intercepted by various ISP’s spam filters so you dont see them from everyone ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2014, 11:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-been-getting-styrage-emails-from-peoiple-i-know-hacked/699472/7 "2014-09-24T23:29:37Z")
> [@drachillix](#): > > More likely you are seeing a series of spoofed email headers > > Someone (say your therapist) picks up a virus that scoops his outlook contact list and sends a link to itself to everyone, then starts sending copies of the same kind of crap to everyone else on the list, as everyone else on the list in turn. > > Some probably are intercepted by various ISP’s spam filters so you dont see them from everyone fair enough my 10-qs 🆒 ---
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2014, 1:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-been-getting-styrage-emails-from-peoiple-i-know-hacked/699472/8 "2014-09-25T01:27:22Z")
Happened to me that my e-mail adress was used to send spam. I knew about it because I was informed that mails (spams) that I had “sent” couldn’t be delivered. ---
**Author:** ![Doug\_K](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b5ac83/32.png) [@Doug\_K](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doug_K)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2014, 3:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-been-getting-styrage-emails-from-peoiple-i-know-hacked/699472/9 "2014-09-25T03:13:30Z")
Just to give you an idea of how easy it is to spoof the return address, I had a cron job running on student laptops last year that would use sendmail to email me if certain problems were detected. The return address on them would be root@computername.local. It wouldn’t be difficult to use a script to send 1000 emails with 1000 different return addresses. ---
**Author:** ![Isilder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/cc9497/32.png) [@Isilder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Isilder)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2014, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-been-getting-styrage-emails-from-peoiple-i-know-hacked/699472/10 "2014-09-25T03:23:15Z")
> [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](#): > > and from my former therapist… Receiving email from yourself is typical spammer behaviour - exploits the difficulty ISP’s have with defining rules that allow their clients to SEND and yet to bar spam. So that doesn’t tell us anything. Receiving spam email saying it is from a known contact, This does make it look like someone somewhere was (and perhaps still is) hacked… Its not multiple of your email contacts, only one. This doesn’t look you are hacked… if the spammer was using your email address book, then you’d get the spam from multiple of your contacts. Just the one, doesn’t look like anything to worry about. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2014, 7:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-been-getting-styrage-emails-from-peoiple-i-know-hacked/699472/11 "2014-09-25T07:42:05Z")
Every now and again, Yahoo mail gets hacked in such way that spammers can sort of trick it into acting as a mail relay for sending messages to contacts within Yahoo accounts - in recent cases, the spammer couldn’t actually log into the account and take full control of it - it was more like capturing a cached version of the ‘compose mail’ page and the hashed password value, then using this to send mails. This happened to my Yahoo account and the symptom was that I and everyone I know started getting spam apparently originating from any of us - but it took a while to realise that Yahoo was the source of the problem (because the ‘from’ mail addresses were everywhere). Changing my account password killed it. Changing the password is usually a good idea. ---
**Author:** ![aktep](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f0a364/32.png) [@aktep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aktep)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2014, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-been-getting-styrage-emails-from-peoiple-i-know-hacked/699472/12 "2014-09-25T16:03:15Z")
In the past few weeks, I’ve received, at a defunct work email address that still “works” but hasn’t been active for about 5 years, phishing/spam from purported former contacts who haven’t sent me mail at that address in maybe 10 years. It’s been in the format of > [@](#): > > From: {Contact name} \ > To: {a huge list of people that are presumably from the contact’s address book} > Subject: From {Contact name} > > Hi {suspicious link} > > {Contact name} Some mail service (aol, hotmail, or yahoo could be common among these contacts) must have had address books compromised. ---
**Author:** ![Chefguy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chefguy/32/138_2.png) [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2014, 5:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-been-getting-styrage-emails-from-peoiple-i-know-hacked/699472/13 "2014-09-25T17:20:26Z")
They’re from peoiple. Top. Peoiple. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2014, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ive-been-getting-styrage-emails-from-peoiple-i-know-hacked/699472/14 "2014-09-25T22:05:49Z")
No new emails.