Yesterday morning, before we left for church, I went on to my computer to check something. When I opened my email, there were hundreds of email messages like the two pictured below. These emails indicated that something I had sent out was undeliverable. It all started around 2:00 a.m. Sunday morning.
As I sat there, more of these messages were coming in every couple of minutes. These were not messages using my main email account but, rather, the account listed on our website. My first thought was that someone had hacked into my email account and was using it to send out spam. I found this odd since my passwords are tremendously secure and difficult to hack. (You know, like I preach to you all the time!)
Joyce and I had to leave for church but once we got there and things settled down, I called the company that handles our email. I discovered that my email account was being used to send spam but that it was not hacked via cracking my password. Instead, the email address was “spoofed.”
Spoofing an email address is where a hacker masks his or her own email address and makes it look like it’s coming from someone else. The process for doing that isn’t as difficult as you might think but email server companies take precautions to prevent it from happening. In this case, however, the security software that should have blocked this hacker’s invasion failed to do its job.
Late yesterday afternoon, it appeared the issue had been resolved. Emails like those pictured above trickled down to one or two an hour. Today, they seem to be gone completely.
May I just say that this was very upsetting to me. Imagine, we’re a computer company – a legitimate one – and spam emails were sent out that looked like they came from us. Yesterday was not one of my better days as far as the business goes.
One person who DID receive the spam email responded with some nasty language. I replied to him with this message:
Hi, ******!
Unfortunately, this email account of ours was hacked at the server level. Our server provider has taken steps to recover the account. This email did not come from us as we are a legitimate computer service company and would never send out this kind of garbage.
I apologize that you received this junk. We’ve been in business for 20 years and never have had an email account hacked.
Again, sorry for the inconvenience.
John
Keystone Computer Concepts
The man wrote back: “My apologies for the graphic language.. Scammers are a pet peeve.” I understand that completely, don’t you?
The hacker used an email list from who knows where. It’s unlikely that you were on it, but if you did receive this spam email, please know it wasn’t from us.
If you’d like to read the scam email that was sent out, just click the button below.
Thanks John, I haven’t gotten any but will be on the lookout.