A Sad Tale of a Computer Virus

Here is an important lesson for all of us. I received an email message from a newsletter reader who shall remain nameless. He wrote:

As you might have been made aware my email accounts were hacked and false emails asking for money were sent.  Also all my contacts were deleted and I am hoping to have them restored soon, so you may get another email like this one.

Please ignore any requests for money or the like.  Also, I was also unaware that they had added a reply to email address so none of the emails announcing my problems actually were coming back to me. 

If you have a email coming from [my email address], it is not coming from me. Delete this email from your contact list.  Also delete my Hotmail and gmail addresses if you have them as I will not be using them anymore to contact you.

I wrote back and questioned if his accounts really had been compromised or if someone had simply forged his email address when sending email messages. He replied:

Actually Dick I had a virus that retrieved my passwords, three weeks afterwards they hacked into my financial records, Gmail, Hotmail, and YahooMail accounts at the same time.

They changed the passwords on all the accounts, redirected the reply addresses on all the email accounts, deleted all the contacts and emptied my inbox, even changed my security questions on my Hotmail account which I can't delete or access now. 

My bank informed me that they attempted to transfer money from my credit card to somewhere else.  All this in the space of two hours.  I caught the banking issue quickly before they could complete anything, but the email issue took a while.  Only Gmail stopped the process automatically by noticing the account was being used from North America and Nigeria at the same time. Yahoo says they can restore my contacts, but Gmail, and Hotmail can't. My saved email messages are gone in Gmail, but YahooMail has recovered them. 

Hotmail has virtually no help without knowing security question, etc. and no one will respond to my pleas of help.

Thanks for the information and also thanks the great newsletter you put out. I am wiser and more protected now.

OK, there are several lessons to be learned from this story but here is the most obvious one: Do you have a good anti-virus program installed in your Windows computer? If so, have the virus definitions been updated TODAY?

Or you might consider switching to Linux or Macintosh, both of which never seem to have these problems.