Kailhofer and An Odd Email

[kailhofer]

Yes, we were hacked sometime last night or early this morning. Just got home and trying to find out how bad it is. My wife says she's been flooded with phone calls all day from people trying to make sure we're ok.

I figure anyone who knows me would know I barely make enough money to pay for the gas to drive to work an hour each way. I'd never afford plane tickets, but I also know Cardiff is in WALES! Insulting. No true fan of the new Doctor Who wouldn't.

Anyhow, I understand everything in our account was wiped out. All contacts and saved emails. Can't tell for sure, since so far we haven't gotten back in since the password reset. Yahoo may be keeping us out for 24 hours for security reasons.

whee.

Nate

[kailhofer]

Nate got hacked. Got to wonder what other passwords were compromised. Can they hack the Lulu account and redirect the payments?

BW[/size]

I don't think so, but I'll change that password, too.

I had copies of all my correspondence about the book, except where people said they wanted them deleted after reading. I'm pretty sure any of them with very private info were deleted out of principle, but I have no way to double check, since everything was deleted. I've heard of hackers faking your email address to send spams, but not of people breaking into a yahoo account to hit up their friends for money. Apparently, they even try to get people in chat and pretend to be the people using info they read in the emails to reinforce the begging for money.

I have a service request in because I'm still locked out. Yahoo says I have to talk to AT&T and AT&T says I have to talk to Yahoo. Pretty frustrating.

Hero said he signed up to a free fraud monitoring site (free for 90 days) just to be sure no one signed up for a credit card in his name, but I don't know the name of it.

[kailhofer]

Several days, one call to Yahoo! (after searching for hours to find a real, live phone number), and two to AT&T, we've finally managed to get back into our email account. It still has no contacts, saved emails, and can send emails, but it can't receive.

What a pain in the ass.

While on hold with yahoo, the waiting message said that there was a virus that caused some accounts to be wiped and send emails about Cardiff and that they were working on it.

Strange that a rampant, out of control bit of self-replicated code attacked us is somehow comforting rather than it be a deliberate effort of a human at the other end of a computer somewhere. I hope it is, then the missing info wouldn't be used for nefarious purposes. It was just maliciousness.

[kailhofer]

Found several interesting things on this.

First off, did any of you receive emails from "kailhofers@yahoo.com" (with an S at the end of kailhofer)?

Looking through our merged yahoo/sbcglobal account from way back when, (but we're still using it) we found that all our emails were being routed to "kailhofers" instead of "kailhofer".

Also, an extra account was added to our email accounts for a Richard Lehner with an email address of dick_l@mac.com. I took a screenshot of it before I deleted it.

I don't know anyone by this name, but I suppose it could have been someone else who was hacked and hijacked, or something at random.. or a hacker not smart enough to not leave his name on the account. I tried logging in to yahoo as kailhofers, and the security question (which of course I don't know the answer to) was created Oct. 18, the day we were hacked.

Anyhow, we can get emails again, finally.