UKC

A link has been sent to every email in my address book....bl:;(dy ..hundreds . Second time this has happened in a couple of months. I can't work out how to send an ignore this email to all the same address . Any ideas ?
Unfortunately I ve had this address for years , but I think it's going to have to go .
Arrrrhhhhhhhh.............and breath.

In reply to mike123:
That means somebody has a list of your contacts.

They might have sent it from their email address and not yours, even if the email pretends to come from your email address.

Your account might not have been hacked.

In reply to mike123:
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/create-continuous-forward-aol-gmail-email-45337.html

the gmail spam bucket will probably filter all the junk to the spam folder.

(edit:oops premature post click.) then you can transition to something a bit more solid than AOL while still getting your mail from the old address.

In reply to mike123:

Just create yourself a GMail account and forward all your email from AOL to that. Also move your contact list. You can configure GMail to send email using your old email address so no one is any the wiser, but GMail is very good at filtering out spam and because you will have no contacts on your AOL account any more, this issue will no longer exist.

In reply to mike123:

My colleague had his AOL account hacked.

If you've had yours done twice can I suggest you (a) use Chrome, and content blocker and a malware remover to keep you safe when you're browsing the porn sites and (b) learn how to pick a strong password.

In reply to elsewhere:

Wow, the way your post is written it sounds like you know what you're talking about even though you're wrong.

In reply to Philip:

First, what you're describing isn't hacking.

Second, people getting infected by every malware under the sun (because they use AVG or Norton or something stupid like that and don't know what a malware scanner even is) and then bots grabbing their user/passwords or scripts sending malware links through their email client is also not hacking, though the steps you've suggested could very likely help in minimizing it in the future. Though personally I'd always suggest firefox and a-d-b-l-o-c-k edge + ghostery over chrome with blocker, and I don't know what a malware remover is but antimalware scanner should be Malwarebytes over anything else.

Third: Seriously, UKC? You can't post the word 'a-d-b-l-o-c-k' to help people because you'd rather people get all sorts of malware hosted ads rather than educate them on how to whitelist? Poor show.

In reply to Removed User:
Knowing what you are talking about and being wrong aren't mutually exclusive.

In reply to Removed User:

A road-b-locker help me discover this!

In reply to mike123:

I accidentally used AOL.com to search for something today.

I feel like everyone who works there probably high-fived each other and got really hopeful about the future.

In reply to Removed User:


I didn't describe anything. I made a statement. Also, 20 years ago I would have argued with someone over the difference between cracking, hacking, phreaking, etc. Now hacking is synonymous with accessing without authority.

There are various different ways these spoof emails after generated. In the case I know of the address book was only hosted with AOL web interface, so the AOL account was compromised. In other cases it can be done malware using an unsecured SMTP server to send all your subdued address book emails and it can set the sender to one of those emails rather than the host.

In reply to Philip:

Not to belabor the point, but this isn't 1999. We're not talking about a person grabbing an address list and sending out links 1 click at a time through an unsecured SMTP (woo, telnet!).

This is a script using his client to send mails or a bot that's logged his password and is sending via webmail. There's no human involved beyond setting parameters on the bot or script. It's not hacking. I'm not arguing the difference between hacking/cracking/phreaking but when you say hacking in 2015 the implication is there's a human behind the attacker side and that simply isn't the case with address book spamming, and hasn't been for over a decade.

In reply to Removed User:

The line you're trying to draw there seems to be fuzzy, at best. How directly involved does a person have to be in order for an attack on my data to count as "hacking"? They're always going to be using programs and/or scripts. Or would you prefer them to be hiding under my desk modifying data on my hard drive with a magnetized needle and a steady hand?