Security firm Websense has reported today that they have seen a sharp rise in the last few days of spam email being sent from Yahoo!, Gmail and Hotmail accounts.  This follows on from news in the last couple of days that a massive phishing attack, where emails are sent purporting to be from a reputable website that asks users to log into fake websites, thus revealing their usernames and passwords, resulted in at least 30,000 email addresses being published online.

The BBC reported earlier Peter Griffin (presumably not the fictional one from Family Guy) had told them…

“I checked my account yesterday and found more than ten e-mails with links [that] were sent from my Hotmail [account] to people from my contacts,”

Despite changing his password, he “found an hour later they had sent another six e-mails”.

It is reported in the phishing attack they asked for your security question and ‘alternate’ email address should your password need to be changed.  This would enable them to log into your account even after your password has been changed or even lock you out of your email completely.

The advice from the Long Climb is to check the sent folder in your webmail and see if any spam messages have been sent from your account.  This is if you have received and responded to, even if you can’t remember whether you did or not, any suspicious emails in the last few months.

If the answer to either of the above questions is yes you should change both your password and your security question.  If not, then monitoring your email account for now should be sufficient.  You can also help friends and colleagues by alerting them if you receive any suspicious emails from their accounts.

Should you be unlucky enough to have been hit by this, and about only 1 in every 1,000 people are, then you should also seriously consider changing your passwords on any other websites where you log in with the same username / password combination.

Finally you should make sure your have anti-virus software installed and that it is up to date.  You might want to consider performing a full scan on your PC as experts have still not ruled out keylogging software, where everything your type is stored and later transmitted to criminals, as the original cause of the problem.

People should not be too alarmed by this.  Following these easy steps will keep you and your email account safe from the spammers.  There is excellent advice available on how to keep yourself safe online from the UK Government, the FBI and in the PC Support section of this website.