Webmail can get hosed too?

August 18, 2008 3:35 PM

Is there a nastyware lurking in this computer? Strange Yahoo! Mail contact list kidnapping observed...

A friend of mine suffered an odd incident on their Yahoo! Mail account, which they only use through their browser: a spam message from some consumer electronics company (that some googling reveals is a probable fraudster) was sent to all their contacts, and the contacts seem to have been deleted after that. They have changed the password and recovered the contact list, but since they are not really computer knowledgeable and I have no access to their machine (a typical Win XP system), not much else to be done there. Some more googling shows up another cases like theirs, but no identification of the nasty. Besides my willingness to help save their bacon, I'm curious about what kind of thing would this be and how it did its trick, able to sneak into a webmail access and spam around the contact list. I'm not linking to the fraudster so as not to give them traffic, but their site as mentioned also in the spam starts with an e, then a dash, then saloon dot com.

posted by Iosephus to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Er, even after three previews I forgot something. The e-mail was indeed sent from their account, and it showed as such in their sent folder. Just pointing that it wasn't e-mail address fakery as far as we can tell.
posted by Iosephus at 3:39 PM on August 18, 2008

This happened to me, too. From what I can tell, it's related to a worm called Yamanner.
posted by infinitywaltz at 3:46 PM on August 18, 2008

This happened to my mum too.
posted by gergtreble at 11:31 AM on August 20, 2008