Yesterday my TR neighbor, Anne, told me one of her email addresses seemed to have been hacked. Her daughter had just forwarded an email, purportedly from Anne, that contained a link to an unknown website. When Anne received the forwarded email, she knew she did not send it and she wasn't sure what to do. My advice was to immediately change her email password, but when she tried to log into her account, her password was not accepted – signaling that a hacker might have changed the password. After an extensive online session and several phone calls with her Canadian internet provider, she was able to get the password changed.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, one definition of the word hack is "…to gain access to a computer illegally." A recent article in the New York Times sited major corporations, such as Apple, Google, Intel, and even the New York Times itself, as victims of Chinese hackers. While hackers going after Fortune 500 companies are not interested in you and me, we are in the sights of spammers and spoofers, who are often one and the same.
Spamming is the sending out of unsolicited emails for the purpose of advertising or for more nefarious reasons. If you use an email application on your computer, or you send email through a web based service, a spam filter will attempt to filter out this junk email. As these filters have gotten better at identifying spam, spammers have had to develop other methods of getting their email into your inbox. One of these methods is disguising the spam as mail coming from someone you know, and to do this they spoof, or hijack, legitimate email addresses.
When a spoofed email is sent, it appears to be coming from a legitimate email address, often from someone you know. The subject line might read something like "Great" or "Check this out," and the body of the email, with or without other text, will contain a link. The link might be totally unfamiliar, or it might be appear to be a link to a familiar website. Don' let that fool you, the visible appearance of a link can be very different from the webpage it really opens (an example appears in the online version of the column).
What has really happened is that you email address, or sometimes just your name, has been captured and is put in the FROM: section of the spam email. In Anne's case her actual email account was hacked, and her address book was used. Several of these bogus emails appear to have been sent, but yet they did not appear in her Sent mailbox, as the hacker must have deleted the message before they could be traced.
Another form of spoofing is using just a person’s name and their online address book. A few weeks ago I received an email message from a friend that did not appear to come from her. The From line showed her name, but the email address was not one with which I was familiar. Since then I have received similar messages from both my sister-in-law and my daughter-in-law. Both times the email showed the correct name attached to an unknown email address, they were addressed to me, and they included a link to a website. All three used online mail accounts: AOL, YAHOO, and HOTMAIL, respectively. Since the address books for these services are maintained online, it is not difficult for a knowledgable hacker to get into the system and extract information without actually hacking individual accounts.
What to do? A good practice to follow is to never click on links in emails unless you are 100% sure of their origin. If you have any doubts, contact the person who sent you the email to find out if it was really sent by them. Also be very wary of unsolicited email from a business, even from one that you regularly do business with. If you think the email may really be important, visit the corporate website through your browser. Legitimate operations will never send you email asking you to enter sensitive information. Such requests are phishing schemes that direct email recipients to counterfeit websites that often resemble the real thing.
It is not my intent to create paranoia, or make you afraid to send and receive email. Just remember that if you think your email account has been hacked, immediately change the password and contact your provider. If you receive an email that you expect is bogus, do not click on any links – your best best is to immediately delete it from your system, and empty your trash for good measure.
Below are several links to websites that discuss email hacking and prevention. And as a final note — I followed the source of one of the bogus emails I received from my friend in New York, and it was sent from central Russia.
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