If you have a Hotmail account, make sure you do not keep any address book information on it.  If you do, remove it right away.

A LOT of Hotmail accounts have been hacked recently and if you are a victim, everyone you have in your address book will get spam from your email address and all of their addresses will also be used by the spammers.

Best practice is to never place any address book data on any online service.  They are just not secure.

Tom,
Do you know it this applies to gmail accounts?
I received some spam from his account that was apparently hacked.

Bill

Mr Bill,

Looks like this issue is spreading.  I would consider any webmail account vulnerable and not put any address book data on any webmail account.  Keep the address book on your PC instead.  

An account could still be hacked but at least then the spammers would not have the emails of everyone you know....

Always somebody up ta no good. Better thay get thay rocks off being nice.

Just a reminder to everyone that this is now a pandemic.

Many of us have recently received a virus link email pretending to be from Gary Zar.  This did not occur because of any security breach on these forums.  I made sure.   ;)

So....someone here most likely had an address book on a web mail service.  It doesn't matter which one, they are all compromised and easily hacked by any hacker with basic skills..

What happens is that your address book is obtained by the hacker.  Then the spammer chooses any email from the address book (or the hacked account owner) to spoof the 'from' and send out a malicious email to everyone in the address book.

Web mail accounts can be useful, but don't EVER put any address book information there for storage.  That way when your account is hacked, there isn't much the spammer can do with it without all your addresses.

Also NEVER store any emails there that have any useful information abut you or any password responses, etc.  Don't save anything on a web mail account you would not WANT a spammer to have.