IIRC, Yahoo! took over for most of the Bells. My Pacbell.net account is now managed by Yahoo!, and I had a similar event happen last year, as well as a friend of mine who had her account with another Baby Bell compromised.
Considering how much support is off-shored these days, it wouldn't surprise me if it was an "inside job".
73, Jim KQ6EA
On 06/29/2013 08:42 AM, Phil Karn wrote:
On 06/26/2013 03:31 PM, Roy wrote:
Thanks Phil. Yes, I'm not sure how it was done but the settings are correct in my PC. AT&T has helped me to assign a new password to my account to shut this down. They say it appears to have been hacked on the AT&T web mail site.
Interesting. I saw no actual evidence in the scam mail itself that your account had been hacked.
This particular message was sent through Yahoo's webmail service. Anyone could subscribe to the amsat-bb list and see who its contributors are, so they would know who to send the scam spam to.
(Wait -- does Yahoo provide service for swbell.net?)
Without cryptographic authentication it's easy to forge email from anyone; SPF helps somewhat but it's often not implemented and is frequently ignored even when it is. In this case I perused the headers myself and saw the IP address 41.71.175.195, which happens to be in Nigeria (look it up!)
It's somewhat trickier to intercept the replies. In this case they did it with a Reply-To: header to a fraudulent account ([email protected]) that'd be easy to miss if you weren't looking for it.
I had theorized that they did this because they hadn't actually gotten into your swbell.net account, but it's possible they did it anyway so that they'd still get any replies from victims after your account had been secured or shut down. It would take a little longer to get [email protected] shut down since it's at a different service provider.
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