I have been hacked

[Texas Ranger]

Emails are going out under my Yahoo account, if you receive one with no subject, other than re, and a web site, delete it.  It came from Slovakia.

[mrcaptainbob]

Yeah. I guess Yahoo must be having a LOT of problems with that. I've been getting a lot of those from my wife's and grandson's accounts. Yahoo changes their home page every few weeks, but can't seem to keep the mail accounts protected. Then again, if MySpace can have access to our accounts and address folders in those accounts, no reason others can't too.

[Brucer]

In the past 4 months I've had several friends with Yahoo and/or hotmail accounts get hacked. Usually you can fix it by changing your password, wait a bit, and change it a second time. I read about how these things get hacked and it seems to be a combination of easy-to-guess passwords plus netbots that do the guessing and keep trying until they get a hit.

"Easy-to-guess" is a bit misleading. You might not think your password is easy to guess but it might fit a certain statistical profile.

[Jeff]

If you do not use a password that includes at least 6 characters with a mix of alpha in upper and lower case, numerical characters and a symbol or two, a brute force hacking script can probably get in in just a few minutes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_cracking

As of 2011, commercial products are available that claim the ability to test up to 2,800,000,000 passwords a second on a standard desktop computer using a high-end graphics processor.[5] Such a device can crack a 10 letter single-case password in one day. Note that the work can be distributed over many computers for an additional speedup proportional to the number of available computers with comparable GPUs.

[Texas Ranger]

Turns out it may not have been hacked, but a phishing expedition from a "harvested" email address.  This particular email address is one I use to protect other email address that a bit more sensitive.

[pigman]

Jeff, are you saying "bob", as my password is not very good. :(  I guess I will have to change my password to Robert. ;)

[clww]

For the past month, I've been getting bogus phishing emails from "Bank of America", concerning our account. Only thing is, we don't have any accounts there! Makes me want to shoot somebody >:(