<p>Agree with MommaJ, this is common nowadays, no need to spam everyone trying to apologize for spam.</p>
<p>Yes, it happened on an Apple computer.
We use Safari.
And our email account is very old (and the contact list is ginormous), a yahoo that was on of the first with DSL. It is now managed by AT&T.</p>
<p>We are now attempting to change the password yet again… Hopefully, it is unlocked now… NOPE, still locked.</p>
<p>I am thinking about shutting this account down and adding more malware.
Everyone has been very helpful here. Thanks so much</p>
<p>I don’t think that this is a browser issue but Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox (BTW, I’m a former Firefox developer) are generally more secure than Safari. Apple doesn’t have a particularly good record at fixing browser bugs quickly compared to Mozilla and Google.</p>
<p>My Yahoo account is also very old - it’s a four-letter username that gets an incredible amount of spam but most of it is filtered out. I like the account because it is very easy to give out because the address is so short. If you want something secure, though, use something that’s unintelligible to others.</p>
<p>I agree with others, get some good malware scanners (I use pc tools, which has been pretty good) and set them up to run automatically (I keep my pc on for that reason, so it can run), and i agree, more then one is good. I run an intelligent scan every couple of days, and a full one once a month, and it seems to do the trick.</p>
<p>It is possible you had a piece of malware known as a keystroke tracker, that reports back where you have visited and the keystrokes, which could give them a password. It also could be they hacked the password because it wasn’t strong enough, or perhaps even hacked the ISP’s mail server (in theory, passwords should never been in human readable form but what is called a 1 way hash, but it is amazing how many morons, like Citibank and the like, have sensitive information in human readable form on the system). </p>
<p>Strong passwords are important, too many people get cutesy and use words, or names of celebrities, and they are short as well. use a mix of numbers, upper and lowercase letters and special characters (!, $, %, ETC) and it is unlikely they will crack it easily. In terms of changing passwords regularly, there was a big paper given recently that said basically with strong passwords, that regularly changing it doesn’t decrease significantly the chance of cracking it…though on the other hand it can give you piece of mind:)</p>
<p>I had something happen like this, though they didn’t crack my password, a ‘spoofer’ used my old ISP account to flood spam (spoofing means they make it look like it came from me), and I was getting flooded with messages from mail systems that rejected what the putz was spewing out there (the moron at the ISP said I must have been hacked, until I pointed out to him there was nothing in my outgoing mail queue from their server, so it wasn’t sent from there)</p>
<p>Happened to me once to my yahoo account. I changed the password and now no longer keep anyone in my contact list. </p>
<p>You can use this opportunity to send everyone an update on your life…while you are apologizing for sending them spam.</p>
<p>it happened to me too. I dont keep my password “saved” on firefox anymore, and I have to re enter it every 24 hrs. its a bit of a pain, but not as big a pain as being hacked .</p>
<p>Use gmail’s 2-step verification to prevent [most] unauthorized attempts to log in to your email account. See [Advanced</a> sign-in security for your Google account](<a href=“http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/advanced-sign-in-security-for-your.html]Advanced”>Official Gmail Blog: Advanced sign-in security for your Google account).</p>
<p>It happened to my daughter a few years ago with a Yahoo account.</p>
<p>And then it happened to me with a Yahoo account a few months ago.</p>
<p>Fortunately, in both cases, these were secondary accounts – not the principal e-mail accounts that we use for most of our communications. And in both cases, we were able to cancel the accounts.</p>
<p>It seems to me that a high proportion of such incidents involve Yahoo accounts, suggesting that Yahoo may be particularly vulnerable to this sort of thing.</p>
<p>By the way, I don’t keep passwords saved on Firefox, either. That didn’t prevent it from happening to me.</p>
<p>Don’t use a word, in any language, as your password. If you do, manipulate it just a bit to throw off any guessing. For example, if you want to use the word “mobile”, you could twist it into “m0bil3” (zero for O and 3 for e). I would add some number as a prefix or suffix to be sure. It is still easier to remember than a completely random made up word.</p>
<p>You can use words…if you do them in a phrase. James Fallows wrote an article for last month’s Atlantic describing his wife’s ordeal after her Gmail account was hacked. His advice on passwords:</p>
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<p>[Hacked</a>! - Magazine - The Atlantic](<a href=“http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/hacked/8673/1/]Hacked”>Hacked! - The Atlantic)</p>