Should This Worry Me...?

I was just checking my e-mail, and it seems that I e-mailed myself today, around noon... The thing is, I haven't checked my e-mail in two, or three days, and haven't even considered sending anything to myself... I've viewed the headers and such, and determined the IP of the sender... I pinged to see if it was up, but it wasn't... I used the visualroute trace thing so I could find the position of the computers on the way over there, and it turns out that it is on my little island (Okinawa)..., though with an IP a little different from that of my own...

I also looked for other information in the header... It looks like they did login to hotmail to send it to me, but if that was true, they'd have to have logged in as me!!! I have a decently complex long password, and the answer to my secret question is just lots of random keys (not asdf). To be on the safe side, I've changed my password again... The message simply said 'gotcha!', with the subject 'boo'... All of the other information matches that of my own, such as the sender name and reply address... Only the hotmail server and the sender's IP are in there. I determined that they logged in from hotmail's website because the message was recieved via HTTP...

Anyways, should this be something I need to watch out for / really worry about? Hopefully changing my password is enough if there was penetration into my account..., or is it? Any ideas would be appreciated... Thanks in advance...

-Tim_axe

haha yeah i think you should..
coz see.. i let my friends know that i got into their e-mail account by sending them an e-mail from their own account.. as a result.. they get an e-mail from themselves.. hehe or it could be another scheme from your e-mail provider..

Ok... Do you think that changing my password is enough for now? If I see anything else weird, I'm gonna write a program to come up with random characters, and use that output as my password... There was no message ID stuff in the header, so it was directly from hotmail or something... Do you think I should ask them (hotmail) about the message, like where the computer that sent it is or something like that? All I know is that it is in Okinawa, but haven't been able to tracert it because it's offline and stuff...

Oh well, as long as anything else weird doesn't occur...

-Tim_axe

My friend i think u better have a good search of ur system as u have a key logger in ur sys as well as a torjan which gives the person whoever is logging on a back door which u cannot c. be careful as sometimes these people do more then replying to you from ur own email.... :)

Clean out your system with an updated virusscanner and install the newest version of sygate or zonealarm, then make sure you change your password again and passphrase at hotmail.
Perhaps when you checked your e-mail on webbased login at work/some friends place or in a cyber cafe, somebody got your password.

Hey Man if u really want to remove any torjans on your system go for Panda AntiVirus Software its the best availaable in the market at present with the best results :):)

Hey Man if u really want to remove any torjans on your system go for Panda AntiVirus Software its the best availaable in the market at present with the best results :):)

lol how can u have 2 post with the same msg with 34 min difference of posting and NOT notice... = \

I think u should update ur virus scanner and have a good old full scan... Make sure u run a firewall like conseal or something elese... Run netstat as often as possible to see if there are any weird connections and run window hider and see if there are any invisible windows if ur win OS doesnt already support seeing them or u dont know how to. And if worse comes to worse, FORMAT. Better safe then sorry.

_NetSyN_

Wow, thats kinda cool. I have heard about marketing people doing this, but not with that message. You can basically use a remailer and an SMTP port to make a message apear to have come from yourself, and if done properly, won't be traced back. BUT, that is not always the case. Like everyone said, get an AV program, check your system for Trojans, etc etc. And remember...there is NO security in hotmail. It is a concept that doesn't exist. If you want privacy, don't use a hotmail account.

Hey guys, wasnt there an exploit with hotmail a while back that let everyone have access?? just wondering, i dont think that is the case anymore. Make sure your not using the save password option in hotmail, disable cookies, and also update to the newest versions of IE, to combat any security holes in your current version(there seemed to be a lot of them, damn microsoft, hehe), and do what the rest of the guys suggested (firewall, antivirus, etc.)

The exploit in hotmail can be used to go immediatly to the secret question thing therefor I don't think that's the prob, cause Tim_axe used a random sentence and password. My guess is that either one close to Tim_axe, like for instance a boy- or girl friend did this to have lol; or that he used some public computer and was not properly logged out or something worse, let windows keep the password on disk; or third, his computer is compromised with a keylogger and trojan... ; or fourth some1 changed Tim_axe's hosts files... so he thinks he's on hotmail while he's not... and giving passwords to the attacker... I think there are more possibilities left... (like a network sniffer) but these are the ones that comes to mind.

yeah i knew it had nothing to do with his prob, i was just currious as to what the exploit was.

Thanks for replying everyone... I found out what (who) it was... Turned out it was one of my friends... I let him borrow my Palm Pilot, and since it defaults to viewing everything after I unlock it, he had access to the file that stored my passwords... He copied it to a text file, and logged on and e-mailed me... He deleted the text file off the PC now... I'm gonna change my passwords and use Mobile DB more, because it requests a password for each access to the database...

Again, thanks...

-Tim_axe

I don't think you need to worry about this one Tim_axe. Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha! (inside joke)

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I also looked for other information in the header... It looks like they did login to hotmail to send it to me, but if that was true, they'd have to have logged in as me!!! I have a decently complex long password, and the answer to my secret question is just lots of random keys (not asdf). To be on the safe side, I've changed my password again... The message simply said 'gotcha!', with the subject 'boo'... All of the other information matches that of my own, such as the sender name and reply address... Only the hotmail server and the sender's IP are in there. I determined that they logged in from hotmail's website because the message was recieved via HTTP...

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Anyone could telnet to a hotmail SMPT server and do a bogus SMPT session. All they have to do is type:

MAIL FROM: [email protected]

to make it look like you sent it to yourself. Spammers are changing addresses like this all the time. This is kiddies stuff. It doesn't present a security problem as such. It's annoying at most, but not dangerous. I wouldn't waste your time thinking about lamers who pull these types of pranks.

Wait a second.......you keep a text file with your passwords in it?

Pardon me, but that's not quite kosher, methinks. One should never write down passwords. It's just not done.

Really, if you're going to go leaving your passwords in some file somewhere, you almost deserve to have that happen to you.

well now that you've figured it out, which makes this response a little too late to help but i was gonna say the same thing as what smirc said and you really shouldn't keep a file with your passwords in them. it's just unorthadox.