How do people hijack your email address to make virus-filled spam look like it's coming from you?

Question

I have a website and this is happening to me. Someone is sending viruses around and it has my email in the sender line and when people reply to the spam, it comes back to me. Are they using a program to do this or what?

Answer 1

Email has no built-in verification of who is sending it. This means that any person can send an email that appears to come from any address. No special tools are needed, just basic knowledge of email headers.

Answer 2

Part of the problem could be your own website or older PayPal links. A lot of people put their email addresses on their website such as a "Contact Us" page.

Spammers then use bots to go through and look for entries containing an "@" such as [e-mail] and evaluate whether it's a valid email address.

A similar approach is used in bulletin boards and forums where the bots look for user postings.

Even if neither of the above two items are the cause, they can do a dictionary attack against your domain. These programs will take the domain such as "mydomain.com" and the prepend names in front such as [e-mail], [e-mail] and so on.

Other spammers will try to query against your mail server for valid addresses.

If you want to know more, you can try the guide below.

Answer 3

the probability is sturdy which you weren't "hijacked". lots extra probably you have been utilising a susceptible password and / or secret question and somebody you be attentive to easily took an informed wager or observed you typing your password. A 'genuine' hacker does no longer be bothered and could no longer care much less approximately reading ninety 9.9% of the populations digital mail. A hacker is after the records on your computer, stuff it is well worth funds inclusive of your credit card selection, social protection selection and so on. Your bandwidth and computing potential is valuble too. replace your password to a good one . a good password could desire to have a minimum of 10 characters, utilising bigger and decrease case letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. do no longer use any genuine words, exceptionally common-to- wager words like love, password, or the call of your husband! Your secret question and answer could desire to be something extremely secret despite in case you are able to desire to make up a nonsense answer. Too a lot of human beings be attentive to the call of your first college or the call of your puppy! in no way tell all people, even your superb pal, what your password is. pals do no longer final continuously. Todays "pal" could be tomorrows enemy! in no way form your password whilst somebody is asking over your shoulder. could you enter your PIN # into an ATM with somebody watching? and in no way write your password down and use a "Stick-It" to attach it on your computer screen. do no longer snicker, human beings do this continuously! Use diverse passwords for each provider you utilize. Your password to start up your computer could desire to be diverse out of your Hotmail password that could desire to be diverse out of your Yahoo password and so on. and alter all of them each and every few months. in case you stick to those few steps , your person digital mail will stay purely that...very own.

Answer 4

your website with email link was pharmed for a valid email, and thy got it using pharfming tools and or web crawlers that seek out valid emails on valid domains, similar to freaking in the phone hacking community and body with a semi visible web page on a decent ISP can be pharmed for email addresses.