This morning, I woke up to 50 messages on my e mail account, some with a "what the heck?" some with a return notice. The last time I e mailed anyone was two days ago, not yesterday (the date it was all supposedly sent). My last e mail was a 'respond to all' e mail for a group of people. Could my account have been sabotaged from that? I've never hit a link on spam and can't figure out how this happened at all.

Does anyone have any idea how this could have happened?
What do I do now? I've had this e mail address forever and wouldn't know where to start if I had to change it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!!

I don't know what caused it, but my Yahoo e-mail was somehow hacked and it would send out a link to some Cialis type drug, to everyone on my contact list.

Changing my password stopped it.

I was a yahoo account, so many that is what happened....but damn i had a really good password (numbers, letters, and a symbol). Thanks! Hope this works.....

Same thing happened to me last year, and changing my password took care of it. Now it's more than 10 characters long, contains several numbers, and features a couple of underscores.

It's a bit of a pain to type, but the peace of mind (mine and of those on my contact list) is worth it.

Here's an analysis of how long it takes to break different types of passwords:
http://cdn.thetechjournal.com/wp-content/u...d22787aafe6.jpg

Do a full virus and spyware scan on your computer (and any computer you regularly use). It's possible you have a keylogger residing on your PC.

Microsoft Security Essentials is my software of choice because it works well and has very low resource consumption. Barring that, Avast! for viruses, and Spybot or Ad-Aware for other malware. Googling for each is a good idea.

And of course, never ever ever use a PC without anti-malware.

I use a program called 1 Password for my email accounts and other sites. This allows me to create long and truly random passwords that I unlock on my computer or phone using one 32 character password that I have memorized.

Could just be coincidence, but a member of a Yahoo group that I just joined got hacked too. Might be a residual effect of the layoff? Bad blood you know, and maybe sloppy exit security.

Otherwise, this sort of thing is common. The precautions suggested are good ones.

Before you run the anti-virus, use GMER to check for rootkits and open back doors. If you have any, the anti-virus program is useless because whatever the problem is can come right back.
http://www.gmer.net/

Actually, any anti-malware program worth its salt checks for those.

I have a mac and the gmer didn't seem to work?

But I do have Norton Antivirus, which I ran on both computers....I hope that's enough...? I also changed my password to something with 10 figures and one cap and a special symbol.

Thanks so much everyone.

Perhaps you were one of the 600,000 that got hit with this? Flashback Trojan

There are other, less newsworthy malware out there that could have snuck in.

If not, you could just be victim of a brute force attack on Yahoo itself. Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc... e-mail is targeted heavily because of the sheer number of people using them.

When you change your password, make sure it's as complicated as possible, but still easy enough to remember. A trick many people use is to use some numbers instead of letters. For example: "tH1515h4RD3r2H4Ck" 1's are I's 3's are E's. 4's are A's. 5's are S's. Etc...

I had a Verizon e-mail address a few years back. When I woke up to find that I was sending myself ads for Canadian Pharmacy, I complained that I had been hacked. I did a search to see how long it had been going on. It returned over 40,000 messages filtered to myself, from myself, and including "Canadian Pharmacy" in the subject line. The "technical support" that I got amounted to an accusation that either PE or myself had become Spammers and our Internet access was terminated.

This time may be a generic attack on Yahoo... When I tried to access my e-mail messages on that account earlier today, every single e-mail message that I attempted to open led to a random message from Governor Rick Snyder... I'll give the account a rest for 24 hours and presume that Yahoo has likely heard the complaints by now. If it keeps happening tomorrow, I will hit "Reply all" and forward every "Message from your Governor" back to the Governor's office. If he hasn't laid off all of his staff, maybe someone will get the message that this is not the way to garner votes...

Yes, had that one before...twice, actually (two different e-mail accounts). Clearly they hack passwords somehow.

For malware, I've always had good luck with Adaware. I'd run it twice...it sometimes finds more things on the second pass.