Read this of you have a Yahoo or BT Yahoo Email Account

[phil_hg_uk]

If anyone on here had a Yahoo Mail account make sure your password is secure I just had a phone call from the 3rd of my customers this week who have had their Yahoo Email Account hacked and judging by google it is happening quite a lot.

The hackers log into the account and spam all the contacts with an email containing a link.

Make sure you password is not a single word or name use a mixture of letters and numbers, also if you have a BT email account remember they also use Yahoo.

I only use my yahoo account for buying and signing up for stuff so I am just going through all the emails to make sure there is nothing there that they could use and I am also deleting all the contacts so they cant use them.

 

[glasgowcyclist]

I've had a sudden influx of spam emails from similarly hijacked accounts. The subject line is either the name of the sender (and probably someone you know, since it's taken from existing contacts) or the date and time like the one I got this morning : 3/8/2013 12:52:35 AM

Read this and you'll see it's a very widespread problem that BT are trying to suggest is virus based rather than a security breach.

There's some good security advice on their help page, particularly about checking your account for unknown sub-accounts and that the forwarding and reply addresses haven't been changed.

GC

 

[accountantpete]

I used to have a BT account until it wouldn't let me log in - after lengthy phone call it turned out that the secret question was case sensitive.

Anyway I switched to another email provider and my spam dropped from 2 per day to virtually nil.

Some part of their system has been compromised.

 

[MrJamie]

My primary BT email stopped working on Thursday, password not accepted (I use separate mail clients on pc and android not the web interface), tried logging in on the website which said it was locked my account for 12 hours, wouldn't accept my secret question. I used BT web chat and they reset my password, but apparently were incapable of unlocking my account. Interestingly the guy didn't mention anything about email hacking.

It's strange though, I don't send email from that account and I don't use it to sign up to anything, I only use it as an inbox for mail forwarded from my domain accounts, so it's not really out there to be discovered and it uses a different password to other accounts. I also don't log in from anywhere other than my desktop at home and my smartphone when not at home.