19. My friends are receiving strange emails from me!

Here’s a sobering thought for you: Of all the email you receive, it’s the messages from your friends and family that pose the greatest threat. Why’s that? Quite simply, it’s because you’re far less likely to be suspicious about their content. If a friend sends you a link or an attachment, perhaps you’d wonder briefly why there’s little (or nothing) in the way of accompanying text, but you may well just click the link or open the attachment anyway, on the assumption that your friend wouldn't be sending you anything harmful.

The spammers and scammers of the world – for whom life is becoming increasingly difficult – know that we’ll react this way to messages from people we know, and they’re doing their best to take advantage of that. The way they do it is to try to hack into your email account. If they’re successful, they can send messages from your account that look exactly as if they’ve come from you (which, in a sense, they have), and they can send those messages to the people in your contacts list – friends, relatives and colleagues.

If you receive a message from a friend or relative that looks at all peculiar, keep this in mind and be suspicious! Send a reply asking if your friend really did send the message and explaining what you thought odd about it. There are two reasons for doing this: first, if it turns out that the message actually was legitimate, it gives your friend a gentle hint that it would be wise to make his messages look more personal! Second, if your friend’s email account has been hacked, he’ll want to know about it.

If you start hearing from your contacts that they’ve received unusual messages from you, there are three things to do:

    If you use a webmail account, such as Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or Google Gmail, log into that account and change your password to remove the hacker’s access to it. If you find that you can’t log in, because the hacker has changed your password to lock you out, be sure to report the matter to your webmail service and ask them to delete the account.

    Send an email message to all your contacts explaining that your account has been hacked and telling them to ignore any messages from you that contain links, attachments or adverts. (If you found yourself locked out of the offending account, you may have to set up a new one to do this, so be sure to make this message as clearly-personal as you can, and tell them to ignore all messages received from your old account.)

    Run full scans of your PC with your anti-virus and anti-spyware software. Although in most cases hackers target webmail accounts by guessing their passwords, it may be that your PC has been infected by malicious software.

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