There are two security issues that are out on the Internet that you should be aware of…
Google has found that some computers infected with a specific malware (virus) that gives you false Google results and sends you to other infected web sites. The nice people at Google have been able to identify the computers that are infected and send a message that appears at the top of their Google search results notifying the user of the issue. This is not Google that is infected but a users computer that is infected. Google monitors their traffic and figured out how these hackers were doing this. For more information just go here:
One other note on this, if this is affecting Google searches, Bing, Yahoo and other searches from infected computers are also most likely affected so switching search engines won’t fix it.
Many of you use on line email instead of (or in addition to on occasion) an email program (like Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird). Many people who do use on line email use Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail services as their primary email address. I have seen several instances recently where an email account has the password “hacked” on line and the account is being used for spam (porn in most cases). This doesn’t mean that your computer sitting in your house has been compromised; it means that using your email address, a hacker has gained access to your email on the internet server and is using it for their own purposes. There are various ways that hackers gain your password to your email address, I am not going to cover that. I will talk about how to figure out if it has happened and what to do about it.
You should log in to your email account by the web site you use for that like hotmail.com, yahoo.com, google.com, etc. Click on your Sent box and see if there are any emails in there that you didn’t send. Look for things like “this really works”, “on line pharmacy”…stuff that you wouldn’t be sending or forwarding. Believe me, it will be obvious. Hopefully, your friends will have called or sent you an email back saying what in the wide world of sports is going on? The good news for this is that a password change will fix this. Just go to the password management area (Microsoft, Yahoo, Gmail, RR all have it) and change your password. And make it a little more difficult to guess this time, 8-10 characters with letters (CAPS and lower case) and numbers at minimum. Then, for those of you who do use programs like Outlook, you will also have to change the password in that program also. For those of you on line users, make sure that the hacker didn’t add any strange addresses to your address book.
For those of you who do use Outlook etc, the detection part may be a little more difficult, but the fix is the same. You may see email returned as undeliverable with an address that you don’t know or don’t have. You may get that wide world of sports email from some of your friends. The fix is the same thing. You will have to change your password on line first (like above) and then change it in your Outlook etc program also.
The disturbing part of this is that it seems this type of email hacking is happening pretty often. Those of you who have AT&T (or any of the SWBell, SBC Global, or any of the other baby Bells) as an internet provider should be aware that you are vulnerable also since AT&T has integrated their on line email system with Yahoo.
