I'm a Spammer

[Working Stiff]

So I'm sitting at work today and I got an email from...myself. What I emailed myself was a link to a Canadian pharmacy selling discount Viagra.

Since I was sitting at work NOT logged into my home account and had no knowledge of said Canadian pharmacy, I was a bit confused. My confusion moved to dismay when I noticed that a bunch of my friends and family were also on the "to" list. They also had just gotten an email from "me" for Canadian Viagra.

My email is a Yahoo account that I have had since about 2002. I have a weird habit of clicking the button that adds the people you receive an email from to your contacts list and I never clear that out, so I've got eight years of various email addresses in there. All sorts of people were on that list. Old employers I use for references. Contacts for jobs I have applied for. People I have done business with. Rick Rothstein is in there. I guess this bot that hacked my account sent a Viagra spam mail to all of them addressed from me.

Anyway, I guess my password was too easy to figure out. My email address got picked up somewhere and run through a program that tried various common passwords and mine was a hit. From there they just generated a spam email to my contacts list from me. That sucks. What also sucks is that as I have talked to people tonight, they act like they thought I was actually sending them a Viagra link.

So I changed my password to random gibberish, and that is supposed to keep the spam bot from hacking my account again. I'm just pissed. And embarrassed. And feeling stupid. Which realistically isn't all that different from most days.

[Parks]

Your internet savvy friends and family should immediately know what happened and know it wasn't you.

You're pretty much screwed on the rest unless you can explain to them one by one what happened.

[keltik]

i've actually had a similar thing happen to me but the email address was slightly different than mine. none of my friends have called me and said to stop sending them Viagra ads. the internet is a tricky place that seems to be used best to exploit sexual organs in order to extract money.

[Working Stiff]

Your internet savvy friends and family should immediately know what happened

In other words, none of them.

I'm basically going to drop it and hope most of them got dumped into spam filters. A couple of people said they never got the email and others said it went to spam, so there is a bit of hope that the damage was minimal. I've got better things to worry about.

[riverboy]

Well here I was expecting a god laugh from this thread. Hope most people didn't get it.

[Roy]

Your internet savvy friends and family should immediately know what happened

In other words, none of them.

I'm basically going to drop it and hope most of them got dumped into spam filters. A couple of people said they never got the email and others said it went to spam, so there is a bit of hope that the damage was minimal. I've got better things to worry about.

I'd buy viagra from the guy with Ron Jeremy as his avatar

[Working Stiff]

Well here I was expecting a god laugh

Check the avatar, man. I'm a porn star, not a televangelist!

Seriously, should Ron Jeremy even be considered a porn star? Is there a point when that title just slips to "old fat guy?"

[roadkill]

So..... you're the one who keeps sending me that stuff?

C'mon I already bought 1000 doses in the past two weeks, I don't need any more. (for a while)

[Jesse B 707]

any idea where i can find some Dofus Kamas?

[mark12b]

I doubt your account got compromised. forging the "from: " header is trivial and requires no access to the account it's pretending to be from. it's like writing a fake return-address on an envelope.

[Working Stiff]

I doubt your account got compromised. forging the "from: " header is trivial and requires no access to the account it's pretending to be from. it's like writing a fake return-address on an envelope.

I get that. Those are harmless because they just scatter shot out into cyberspace, the chances that someone who actually knows me will get the email is not really significant.

This DID compromise my account. The bot specifically sent the email to people who were in my contacts, people who know me. It basically made me look like a spamming ass to my friends and acquaintances who were in my contact list. If it did not have access to my account, how did it get my contacts?

I don't need any help looking like an ass. I can handle that all on my own.

[JimW]

Why not send out an e-mail to your contacts list titled "Sorry about the spam" or something like that and containing an explanation of what happened.