[Coco] List member account compromised: (was: Hello)

[John E. Malmberg]

It means that the list member's AOL account has been taken over by 
criminals and any links or attachments in e-mail from it are not safe.

This issue has already been reported to AOL through their abuse address.


If someone has an alternate way to contact Paul H, they should notify 
him of the problem in case AOL has not yet been able to contact him.

It would be useful to know how the criminals obtained the password to 
help others avoid being caught.


Because it was a list member's legitimate e-mail address that was taken 
over, and it was sent through the member's ISP, there is very little 
that the list administrator can do to preemptively filter out such spam 
before the first one makes it to the list.


On the multiple mailing lists that I am on, this is at least the 5th 
case this year where a member's account password has been obtained by 
criminals, much higher than any year in the past.

1 Hotmail, 2 Yahoo, 1 Earthlink, and now 1 AOL user.

In only one case, the person admitted falling for a password phishing 
e-mail to revalidate their account credentials.

In the other cases, how the password was obtained has not been 
determined, which indicates that it could be from either malware 
installed on the system, or use of the password on an insecure WiFi 
connection or shared computer.

I have seen the fake anti-virus malware install it self last year on PCs 
that were protected by up to date by major anti-virus products like they 
were not even there.  So you can not depend on anti-virus to protect you 
from links.

Regards,
-John