My password had been changed?? Part 2

Forgive the second post, however, I ended up with more questions!

I am looking to regain, not hack my account. I am not willing to do anything illegal. And it seems pretty silly to ask anyone to hack a account seeing that they could always change your password again, hint why I never posted my username.

Thank you Mike*0*, even if you where not civil. So, you are saying it is near impossible for someone to hack your account? I really feel what happened is an error somewhere in the system. I am unaware of any Trojans on my computer? Will virus scan pick them up and how do they affect the system? Also, from what I have read, keylogger is something that only figures out passwords use on that computer? I know I have not sent my password to anyone and the only people who use my computer is my family. I also have never answer any scam mail about sending my password out. I am not into hacking and never will be. I have little time on my hands and do not sit in front of a computer all day; however, I do keep my dial-up connection on all the time. If that is any help to you, the only thing I have running is bittorrent. The day that I got the letter saying my password was changed was a day my computer was unhooked and we were on a trip. So do these programs work instantly or do they take time on access your information? Also, lets say it was a Trojan or something like that; will they only work on one account or all?? No other accounts have been changed. I thought that Trojans or things like that had to be download, via opening an attachment to e-mail or things of the nature. The only things I have downloaded recently are codec packs for media player.

I have no ***** to spend, really means, don’t reply to this and say give me $*50 and I will hack your account. Don’t try to send me to some program that was made and say it works. I will not believe you. Just because I have long ears, a fluffy tail, and a little brain does not mean I am easily scammed!

Ok, you say contact yahoo, see the real issue I am having is each time I do the say my birth date is wrong and I seem not to remember which I put down 7 years ago, along with my security question and password to that. I am also wondering if someone crack my account, could they have changed my birth date or no matter how old the account is, yahoo will still not let you change your birth date online? I have had this account since around ***8. Is there anything anyone can s***est to do to be able to contact yahoo on this matter. Yes, I understand, I am an idiot for not know what birthday I put down. Forgive my stupidity of youth.

I am also wondering what you mean by “brute force” hack? Also, I have heard from internet sites that if you add numbers, letters, capital letters, some punctuation and symbols that you are better protect against hacking, is there any truth in this?

Thanks for your time, patience, and consideration on this matter! Also, thank you for any help you have to offer in advance!

Mrs. Bunny 4

[QUOTE=Bunny 4]Forgive the second post, however, I ended up with more questions!

I am looking to regain, not hack my account. I am not willing to do anything illegal. And it seems pretty silly to ask anyone to hack a account seeing that they could always change your password again, hint why I never posted my username.

Thank you Mike*0*, even if you where not civil. So, you are saying it is near impossible for someone to hack your account? I really feel what happened is an error somewhere in the system. I am unaware of any Trojans on my computer? Will virus scan pick them up and how do they affect the system? Also, from what I have read, keylogger is something that only figures out passwords use on that computer? I know I have not sent my password to anyone and the only people who use my computer is my family. I also have never answer any scam mail about sending my password out. I am not into hacking and never will be. I have little time on my hands and do not sit in front of a computer all day; however, I do keep my dial-up connection on all the time. If that is any help to you, the only thing I have running is bittorrent. The day that I got the letter saying my password was changed was a day my computer was unhooked and we were on a trip. So do these programs work instantly or do they take time on access your information? Also, lets say it was a Trojan or something like that; will they only work on one account or all?? No other accounts have been changed. I thought that Trojans or things like that had to be download, via opening an attachment to e-mail or things of the nature. The only things I have downloaded recently are codec packs for media player.

I have no ***** to spend, really means, donR*7;t reply to this and say give me $*50 and I will hack your account. DonR*7;t try to send me to some program that was made and say it works. I will not believe you. Just because I have long ears, a fluffy tail, and a little brain does not mean I am easily scammed!

Ok, you say contact yahoo, see the real issue I am having is each time I do the say my birth date is wrong and I seem not to remember which I put down 7 years ago, along with my security question and password to that. I am also wondering if someone crack my account, could they have changed my birth date or no matter how old the account is, yahoo will still not let you change your birth date online? I have had this account since around ***8. Is there anything anyone can s***est to do to be able to contact yahoo on this matter. Yes, I understand, I am an idiot for not know what birthday I put down. Forgive my stupidity of youth.

I am also wondering what you mean by “brute force̶*; hack? Also, I have heard from internet sites that if you add numbers, letters, capital letters, some punctuation and symbols that you are better protect against hacking, is there any truth in this?

Thanks for your time, patience, and consideration on this matter! Also, thank you for any help you have to offer in advance!

Mrs. Bunny 4[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE]"So, you are saying it is near impossible for someone to hack your account?"[/QUOTE]

Yes, if it is a major email service like hotmail, then it's almost totally impossible to hack, with brute force etc.

[QUOTE]"I really feel what happened is an error somewhere in the system."[/QUOTE]

Highly unlikely it was an error, probably a trojan, keylogger, fake site etc or something.

[QUOTE]"Will virus scan pick them up and how do they affect the system?"[/QUOTE]

Are you telling me that you don't have an antivirus? You should really get one, if you don't have one then you will almost definitely have some trojans/viruses running in the background, probably sending your passwords away. That goes for anyone without AV, get one now. Trojans and viruses will, once downloaded, install themself so they run on startup, then depending on what they are programmed to do, usually send out your passwords or allow people in to steal it themself.

[QUOTE]"Also, from what I have read, keylogger is something that only figures out passwords use on that computer?"[/QUOTE]

Keyloggers log all keystrokes you press, then send them to someone's email. Usually containing all the usernames + passwords you have entered, especially bad if you have signed in to ebay or something, then you're looking at your **** account being drained of *****.

[QUOTE]"I know I have not sent my password to anyone and the only people who use my computer is my family."[/QUOTE]

Good for you, but have you considered that your family (maybe a brother/sister) would have inadvertently downloaded a trojan they thought was something else, especially if you don't have antivirus. Also, another thing is, if you have dial up, keyloggers can search and send out dial up login passwords, so make sure you scan with antivirus.

[QUOTE]"the only thing I have running is bittorrent"[/QUOTE]

File sharing networks are known for containing lots of viruses and trojans, it's the perfect place for the writers of them to distribute them - millions of inxperienced users who will trust anything they find.

[QUOTE]"So do these programs work instantly or do they take time on access your information?"[/QUOTE]

I don't know what you mean, yes, programs that automatically steal passwords will send out the passwords immediately, but it will take a while for the hacker (or n00b in most cases) to find it in their inbox.

[QUOTE]"Also, lets say it was a Trojan or something like that; will they only work on one account or all??"[/QUOTE]

They will take all available accounts, not just randomly leave one, any account that you accessed (if it's a keylogger) or have passwords stored of will be vulnerable.

[QUOTE]"I thought that Trojans or things like that had to be download, via opening an attachment to e-mail or things of the nature."[/QUOTE]

Yes, ALL trojans/viruses have to be downloaded by the user, there's no easy way to hack someone without THEM downloading the trojan, unless you use some sort of exploit.

[QUOTE]"I have no ***** to spend, really means, donR*7;t reply to this and say give me $*50 and I will hack your account. DonR*7;t try to send me to some program that was made and say it works. I will not believe you. Just because I have long ears, a fluffy tail, and a little brain does not mean I am easily scammed!"[/QUOTE]

Yes, keep that attitude and you won't lose your ***** to the millions of scammers willing to take it off you.

[QUOTE]"Ok, you say contact yahoo, see the real issue I am having is each time I do the say my birth date is wrong and I seem not to remember which I put down 7 years ago, along with my security question and password to that. I am also wondering if someone crack my account, could they have changed my birth date or no matter how old the account is, yahoo will still not let you change your birth date online?"[/QUOTE]

It's easy to change birth date, they can just use the settings page. Most scammers will just grab all the passwords thay can and then leave the account, we are talking about people that may have done this thousands of times, they don't care about your personal emails, just the passwords. if they have taken control of the account and spent that much time to change everything, then either they are someone who knows you and stole it from you who wants to read your personal emails, or it is a n00b with nothing better to do than to steal someones email account then read personal emails, they do not have the knowledge to do anything more with it.

[QUOTE]"I have had this account since around ***8."[/QUOTE]

That's real bad, because i'm *0% sure that you will not get that account back, unless yahoo step in to get it for you.

[QUOTE]"Is there anything anyone can s***est to do to be able to contact yahoo on this matter."[/QUOTE]

Yes, email them and say what happened, then say that it contains **** details etc, then they will be able to examine logs to establish the fact that it did belong to you, then maybe get it back for you.

[QUOTE]"I am also wondering what you mean by “brute force̶*; hack? Also, I have heard from internet sites that if you add numbers, letters, capital letters, some punctuation and symbols that you are better protect against hacking, is there any truth in this?"[/QUOTE]

Brute force is basically using a program to keep trying passwords until you get the correct one, it's only possible on some login pages that do not protect from brute forcing, services like hotmail lock accounts after about 5 tries. Brute forcing works best with short words or even better, words in a dictionary, they will try all words in the dictionary and then try all possible combinations of the alphabet and numbers, you probably can guess that it takes DAYS to do it this way. So they were right, if you add random numbers and stuff and make it longer, then it will be harder to crack, whatever you do don't use a word in the dictionary. Also, before anyone goes asking me to recommend any brute forcers, it's about the most dangerous thing to do in hacking, a network admin will see thousands of connections coming from you and it will be totally obvious what you are trying, if you are brute forcing someone, you might as well go and hand yourself in to the police right now. Having said that, most good brute forcers have the option of using a proxy, this is a lot more safe, especially if it's a trusted one that refuses to show logs. If anyone is interested in trying a brute force attack on their own network, not HOTMAIL, then you could pm me and I could give you a few links to the well know brute forcers, but most sites protect againt it anyway so this is only for experimenting on your own LAN.

Thank you very much for all the answers to my questions! I really appreciate it!

I do have Norton Antivirus on my computer with Windows XP home edition. I have it in a weekly schedule and it has never reported a virus, I also keep it updated. Just scanned with my antivirus and no reports of anything.

My family consists of my husband and 2 year old, lol! Which out of both of them, the 2 year old spends more time on the computer then we do, lol!

Oddly enough I was not using bittorrent when I lost my account. Questions, how is it you can get a virus from bittorrent, would it be within the video file?? Would you see a file being downloading for a trojan or other virus? Or do they download that fast?

I lost it when my computer was unpl***ed and was on my way down to a Christmas gathering the 20th, I did not know my password got changed until after Christmas, the 26th. Well it was only my one yahoo account, my husband’s account never got touched, nor my other mail accounts or bill accounts! Well I hope if the stole it to read the mail they enjoy beauty and jewelry things, lol! I did change the passwords to all accounts on the 28th when I returned home. Still no accounts have been changed since either. Odd!

I am going to get into contact with yahoo, while I have a minute and see what they can do. I am really thankful for all your help sir or ma’am! Have a wonderful weekend!

Thank You!!
Bunny 4

[QUOTE=Bunny 4]Thank you very much for all the answers to my questions! I really appreciate it!

I do have Norton Antivirus on my computer with Windows XP home edition. I have it in a weekly schedule and it has never reported a virus, I also keep it updated. Just scanned with my antivirus and no reports of anything.

My family consists of my husband and 2 year old, lol! Which out of both of them, the 2 year old spends more time on the computer then we do, lol!

Oddly enough I was not using bittorrent when I lost my account. Questions, how is it you can get a virus from bittorrent, would it be within the video file?? Would you see a file being downloading for a trojan or other virus? Or do they download that fast?

I lost it when my computer was unpl***ed and was on my way down to a Christmas gathering the 20th, I did not know my password got changed until after Christmas, the 26th. Well it was only my one yahoo account, my husband’s account never got touched, nor my other mail accounts or bill accounts! Well I hope if the stole it to read the mail they enjoy beauty and jewelry things, lol! I did change the passwords to all accounts on the 28th when I returned home. Still no accounts have been changed since either. Odd!

I am going to get into contact with yahoo, while I have a minute and see what they can do. I am really thankful for all your help sir or ma’am! Have a wonderful weekend!

Thank You!!
Bunny 4[/QUOTE]

If you have norton AV and have scanned and found no viruses, then I am sure that your account was not stolen through a trojan or keylogger. Since there is no way to just directly "hack" major email services like yahoo or hotmail, then it must have been through some sort of social engineering or scam. You need to think back to when you lost it, did you click any links from within an email that may have lead to a fake login page, did you send your email address and password to one of those "forgot password autobot" scams that claim to be able to "hack" email accounts, but are only designed to steal YOUR password (if you did then you deserve to lose your account), you need to try and remember if you did anything like that what you thought nothing of at the time, but what may have lost your account.

[QUOTE]Oddly enough I was not using bittorrent when I lost my account. Questions, how is it you can get a virus from bittorrent, would it be within the video file?? Would you see a file being downloading for a trojan or other virus? Or do they download that fast?[/QUOTE]

I now do not think you lost it through a trojan, so this doesn't really matter. Files downloaded from bittorrent are exactly the same as any file you would download using a web browser, bittorrent is just a different way of distributing them.

"how is it you can get a virus from bittorrent"

The same as any other virus, you download it then you run it, there's no easy way of virus writers getting them onto your computer, even on bittorrent. It definitely would not be from a video file, I don't know what you may have heard, but there is NO way to infect someone with a virus from them opening a video/image file. Both are designed to hold only data, not to be executed, so there is *********ly no way it would even be possible, apart from using exploits in windows to execute code hidden in them, which is not a very common thing to happen. You have said you are contacting yahoo, i think this is the best thing for you to do, they will be able to sort this out for you if it was stolen somehow, but they will not help you get it back if YOU were to blame, like by believing you could hack someone else's email by sending your password to some obviously fake email address.

No, the only thing I could have done was sign in on a fake log-in page, however maybe a friend hacked my account thinking it was funny! Who knows anymore.

So, I am really glad to know that what I am downloading on BitTorrent is pretty safe. All I do is anime titles.

I never have given my password out or try to hack anyone. I did contact yahoo, but they can't do anything for me since my birthday does not match, so I will just keep trying to figure out how I messed it up till I get my account back! Well that cover it!

Thanks for everything!

[QUOTE=Bunny 4]Thank you very much for all the answers to my questions! I really appreciate it!

I do have Norton Antivirus on my computer with Windows XP home edition. I have it in a weekly schedule and it has never reported a virus, I also keep it updated. Just scanned with my antivirus and no reports of anything.

My family consists of my husband and 2 year old, lol! Which out of both of them, the 2 year old spends more time on the computer then we do, lol!

Oddly enough I was not using bittorrent when I lost my account. Questions, how is it you can get a virus from bittorrent, would it be within the video file?? Would you see a file being downloading for a trojan or other virus? Or do they download that fast?

I lost it when my computer was unpl***ed and was on my way down to a Christmas gathering the 20th, I did not know my password got changed until after Christmas, the 26th. Well it was only my one yahoo account, my husband’s account never got touched, nor my other mail accounts or bill accounts! Well I hope if the stole it to read the mail they enjoy beauty and jewelry things, lol! I did change the passwords to all accounts on the 28th when I returned home. Still no accounts have been changed since either. Odd!

I am going to get into contact with yahoo, while I have a minute and see what they can do. I am really thankful for all your help sir or ma’am! Have a wonderful weekend!

Thank You!!
Bunny 4[/QUOTE]

You need more than just an antivirus package, especially if you are doing any bittorrent downloads. You need a minimum of * things:

A firewall
An antivirus packackage
an anti adware package

I had all * of these things on a desktop machine that I had not used for about a year and a half, and guess what? They were all so far out of date in *8 months that the very first bittorrent site that I went to, infected my PC within 5 seconds.

In the time it took me to realize what was happening, (about *0 seconds) I had already aquired about *50 virus'es, trojan downloaders, adware pop up ads, and other assorted "malware". It brought my PC right to its knees.

I thought I had fairly good protection too. I was using;
BlackIce for my firewall
Nortons Enterprise version of their Antivirus
and Adaware for the rest of the garbage.

However, whatever was in that first "Trojan Downloader" cut through all * defense systems like a hot knife through butter -- all because they were *8 months old (obselete).

I also discovered later that they were trying to infect the rest of my local network at home, fortunately I have "current versions" of "Zone labs Security suite" on my other PC's, or else I would have had 4 infected computers in that *0 seconds, because not only were the trojan downloader(s) pulling stuff in from the Internet, but they were also kicking this garbage back out on the same ethernet connection to my local network, and trying to instaall it onto all the PC's attached to it. It got ugly real fast.

And best (or worst) of all, I can't blame anyone but myself, because once you download a bittorrent file, you have just joined a "swarm" of other PC's so you really don't know where the "bad stuff" came from unless you happened to have a network sniffer running on your PC at the time.

GW

[QUOTE=GreyWolf]You need more than just an antivirus package, especially if you are doing any bittorrent downloads. You need a minimum of * things:

A firewall
An antivirus packackage
an anti adware package

I had all * of these things on a desktop machine that I had not used for about a year and a half, and guess what? They were all so far out of date in *8 months that the very first bittorrent site that I went to, infected my PC within 5 seconds.

In the time it took me to realize what was happening, (about *0 seconds) I had already aquired about *50 virus'es, trojan downloaders, adware pop up ads, and other assorted "malware". It brought my PC right to its knees.

I thought I had fairly good protection too. I was using;
BlackIce for my firewall
Nortons Enterprise version of their Antivirus
and Adaware for the rest of the garbage.

However, whatever was in that first "Trojan Downloader" cut through all * defense systems like a hot knife through butter -- all because they were *8 months old (obselete).

I also discovered later that they were trying to infect the rest of my local network at home, fortunately I have "current versions" of "Zone labs Security suite" on my other PC's, or else I would have had 4 infected computers in that *0 seconds, because not only were the trojan downloader(s) pulling stuff in from the Internet, but they were also kicking this garbage back out on the same ethernet connection to my local network, and trying to instaall it onto all the PC's attached to it. It got ugly real fast.

And best (or worst) of all, I can't blame anyone but myself, because once you download a bittorrent file, you have just joined a "swarm" of other PC's so you really don't know where the "bad stuff" came from unless you happened to have a network sniffer running on your PC at the time.

GW[/QUOTE]

It seems your firewall and antivirus protection was adequate, but the place where your security failed was with the old, unpatched software. Without updating regularly, your computer can be easily exploited to install malware; even with antivirus programs running.

its possible that if you use other forums or anything else where you have to create a username and password that either the admin of one of those forums could have got your password or if a hacker found an exploit in one of those forums then they could have hacked it and stolen your password.

i was a member of a forum that was hacked a couple of years ago and every member of the forum got an email sent to them from whoever had hacked it with their username and password in it.

your email password is probably one of the most important passwords you have along with ****ing and ebay stuff.

i always use a really strong alphanumeric password for those and a less secure and easy to remember password for everything else, and i would never signe up with some forum and use the same password as i use for my email or anything else equally as important.