Has Address Book been hacked?

The content of some recent email messages has got me wondering if someone could have gotten access to my address book and is
using trusted contacts as a means to send me malicious links.

That seems pretty wacky to me, but here is what happened.

About a month ago I got an email from a relative, who has probably emailed me only once or twice before, which contained only
one word and a link. When I attempted to connect to that site / page, it was blocked by my security software.

Within the last week, I got an email from two friends (one each) which contained only a link.

Within my browser, both were blocked by Avast anti-virus. Thank You Avast!!

Both of those people are good friends and would not knowingly send me malicious crap designed to install a Trojan.

Everything is up to date, except that I'm still using Outlook Express 6 and Opera 11.64 as my primary browser.
I do not have the Avast email shield installed - haven't had any problems and virtually no spam.

Is it possible that my address book has been hacked?
Weird, I know, but so are those emails.

Opinions? Remedies?
Thanks.

 

Likely your friends email addresses and your email address has been discovered by SPAMERS. I categorize all folks that send you unwanted emails as SPAMERS. One way these SPAMERS pick up email addresses is by starting an email chain and counting on the recipients to forward the emails to their friends and so on and so on. Eventually, the email comes back to the SPAMMER and now he has hundreds and maybe thousands of "live" email addresses. He then sends his SPAM emails out using one of the legitimate email addresses as the reply address. In that way the email appears to come from a trusted person and more likely to be opened.

So, a couple of things. Treat unexpected or suspicious email like a knock on your door at 3 AM. Be careful!!!!

Next do not ever forward emails to a group with TO:, use BCC: instead.

Never forward emails that contain other email addresses. Cut and paste what you want into a new email and then send it off. If it was not worth the effort to cut and paste then it probably is not worth sending.

 

Sound like you are getting spam now. I would mark these e-mails as spam and enable the Avast shields, and run an antispyware. When these e-mails come in, put your cursor on the name and you should see what the e-mail address is, then you will know if it's from your friends or not.

 

Thanks jconstan.
Your description sounds appropriate and little doubt that is what happened.
I was careless and wasn't aware that could happen.

Did a quick search and found these two articles:
Outlook Express BCC
Using Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) in Outlook Express

Thanks Nick. Had not thought of checking the sender name like that - just took it at face value.
I used the Custom Install for Avast and did not install the IM shield and P2P shield because I don't use those.
The Mail shield isn't for catching spam, it's a malware filter, so don't know if it would be of any value in these cases,
but I'll try it out.

 

No, it doesn't work that way - spammers can easily forge the "From:" address.

What needs to be done is look at the email headers, then find the IP address where the message originated from. Spamcop can help finding the originating IP address.

 

All true, but the IP address alone is not enough to determine if the reply address is "correct".

 

All respect to everyone...Pwillener is right about this.

I had the exact same thing happen to me. The addresses of the senders were definitely forged. The thing that bothered me the most was that this "spammer" might be sending messages to my contacts and not just to me. I sent notes out to them to let them know.

This was about 2 years ago. About 2 weeks after the attack, my Hotmail account (my main e-mail account) was shut down. I tried to reinstate it, and it took me well over a year of contacting Microsoft intermittently to prove that the account was indeed mine. It was a huge relief to get the account back, since it's the only one I've ever had since 1995 (other than mandatory Yahoo!) besides the one I had to set up at a less known e-mail net host after this incident.

Due to the speed with which MS moved to close my account and due to things I had read in the past about their servers being hacked, I developed the opinion that likely many accounts had been hacked and that mine was just one of them. I don't know, but it just came across that way to me.

Scary business someone sending e-mails to contacts in my name...I don't think they ever did, but the idea got to me. Glad that is over with...

 

It will show if the message originated from the servers of that email address. Say that the spammer forged a friend's AOL address into the "From" field, but the message originated from somewhere in Pakistan...

 

I don't think anyone disagreed with pwillener.........

.........and it's never over.

 

I think it would be a stretch to determine ligitimacy of a reply email address simply based on IP address. While I would submit that if a domain that owned a particular IP address was in China which may be suspicious and likely not an Aol address, but not 100% and the email recipient would have to be a little more than a novice to acquire that information.