Resolved Spam email being sent from my accounts

It has been reported to me that unauthorized email is being sent from several of my accounts. How does this happen and what can I do about it? What additional information should I post here to help troubleshoot this issue? Thanks.

 

cursor, Welcome to Windows BBS

First point, there is a fair chance that no spam has been sent from your accounts (however the fact you say several does concern me).

It is very easy to spoof the sending email address (not so easy for the IP address) of spam but like I said several bothers me.

Let's rule out rootkits/trojans first, please read this and start a new thread in Malware and Virus removal with the requested logs.

 

Thanks a bunch for your input thus far.
One of the accounts that has been sabotaged is a yahoo email account. Looking at the 'Sent' box shows batches of emails being sent (with no subject line) to folks that I don't know. When I changed my password to that single account, the emails stopped.

Five other accounts that I have, tied to my owned URL, have also been used to broadcast spam. At least it appears that they're being used. With these other five, however, there are no entries in the 'Sent' boxes.

 

Thanks for the feedback cursor

We can probably ignore your yahoo account now as it was hacked but how did that happen was your password secure did you share it with anyone... A couple of things to think about.

Now, your other accounts tied to your own domain name (not URL ), how are they managed, on your own systems, an external provider ???

 

Thanks wildfire. =)

I had not shared my Yahoo email account password with anyone.

The other email accounts, connected to my domain name, are controlled using cpanel through either of two personal computers. On the same day that I changed my Yahoo account email password, I changed all other (domain name connected) email account passwords. Since I see nothing in the 'Sent' folder of those accounts, I don't know if they are still used to broadcast email spam.

 

I've made a couple of entries in my forum profile.

Will do. Thanks. =)

Reading what Google's Gmail has to say about the issue, I captured the email headers from three different offending email accounts:

• Sent from myUserName1@myDomain
  (Received at my wife's email account, myWife@myDomain).
• Sent from myUserName2@yahoo.côm
  (Received at myUserName1@myDomain)
• Sent from myNephew@yahoo.côm
  (Received at myUserName1@myDomain)
• Sent from mySon@MSN.côm
  (Received at myUserName1@myDomain)

 

It would be good to see the actual headers and compare IP addresses (email addresses are useless for tracing the sender), but as I said rule out malware first.

BTW,

You may have made entries in your profile regarding system specifications but you're still not letting us see them

 

Done.

 

Changing passwords for all accounts seems to have worked. Thanks for your willingness to help, folks.

 

This points toward a compromised system. I'd still advise a visit to Malware and Virus Removal

Please read this post and follow instructions.

 

If the system is compromised, how did it happen, and could it happen again?
Spambots scour the web and harvest email addresses, and password crackers break weak passwords to get into the accounts.

If your email address can be found by entering it into a google search, then the spambots are just as likely to have your address. if you change your password, and the spam stops, they have probably not cracked your new password yet. Many email passwords are inherently weak simply because they are too short.

Each additional character multiplies the number of permutations by about 70 for Yahoo, with their allowable lower and uppercase, numerics and some symbols in passwords.

8 characters is crackable by a suitably large cloud of dedicated cracking computers in hours, 9 is 70 times that and 10 is 4900 times greater. Whatever the number of permutations for any length of password, the average number of tries to crack the password is half that number.

For Yahoo a 12 character password of numbers, lowercase, uppercase, and punctuation symbols has about 1.4x10^22 permutations, or is likely to be guessed in 7x10^21 attempts, or of the order of a trillion days for a very fast processor.

Or just go for length - when told that a strong password was eight characters and one capital, a little girl decided on:

"MickeyMinniePlutoHueyLouieDeweyDonaldGoofySacramento "

 

Flyboytim that's not quite how it works, though I do understand your reasoning. Read the thread from the start