Has something been hacked?

[Peter]

I've received two e-mails about a week apart from people that are known to me and who are not nefarious.  Each contains a short "Hi" or "Greetings" followed by the iniitials from my e-mail address.  The only other content is a (different) hyperlink, neither of which, on the face of it, bear any relationship to the ostensible senders.  Have I or they been hacked?  If I click on the links, will my m/c be compromised/will I explode, etc.?  My instinct is just to junk them.   I'd contact the people directly but I lost my address book recently and I don't know if the given e-mail addresses are genuine.

Prudence says just delete them but I'm wondering if some sort of "drip" is going to go on, a message a week, or something.

Any ideas?

[SteveC]

I've been getting loads of these.
Delete.
Don't know what the cause is but I'm not going to click on any of those links.

[Ian H]

Yes, someone somewhere has been hacked.  I've had several from different friends.  None are aware they've sent me anything.

[Peter]

OK, thanks!

[woollypigs]

There are bots/Trojan/what ever they are called out there that collects e-mail addresses and then send from random to random. They don't even need to be connected to someone's email account to be sending out.

[Ian H]

There are bots/Trojan/what ever they are called out there that collects e-mail addresses and then send from random to random. They don't even need to be connected to someone's email account to be sending out.

All mine of this kind so far have  been from friends.

[zendog]

Curious about this one. Both my wife and daughter have had similar emails apparently from me in the last week.

Full scans of Windows defender and malwarebytes on my desktop didn't come up with anything.

 

[Ian H]

Could be any third party with your addresses.  I had one recently from someone whom I'd lay money on not letting anything nasty into his system.

[Ham]

Just sent a mail to someone here before seeing this. Curious.

[tonycollinet]

Most likely is someone with you and friends in their address book has been compromised.

Their machine sends dodgy mails to all their friends. BUT not necessarily looking like it comes from them (Spoofed to look like another mutual friend from the address book).

Someone else on the list also gets compromised, and the process repeats.

[Polar Bear]

I checked my spam boxes (three different email addresses) and one of the addresses has a few similar spams.   The numbers were very low but interesting in the fact that the spams relate to old clients with whom I have not had contact by email for more than three years.     

[ian]

As said, this is common, someone's contacts get compromised and this is the result. Your friends will share contacts with you. Also, comprised online mail hosts (gmail, yahoo). Sensible to check your own systems but beyond that delete and move on.

[contango]

I've received two e-mails about a week apart from people that are known to me and who are not nefarious.  Each contains a short "Hi" or "Greetings" followed by the iniitials from my e-mail address.  The only other content is a (different) hyperlink, neither of which, on the face of it, bear any relationship to the ostensible senders.  Have I or they been hacked?  If I click on the links, will my m/c be compromised/will I explode, etc.?  My instinct is just to junk them.   I'd contact the people directly but I lost my address book recently and I don't know if the given e-mail addresses are genuine.

Prudence says just delete them but I'm wondering if some sort of "drip" is going to go on, a message a week, or something.

Any ideas?

Check the email address they came from is actually your friend's address.

I had a few emails that came from "My Friend <myfriend@domain.com>" where the friend's email was actually myfriend@someotherdomain.com - so the scammers got enough details to look very similar but didn't actually have access to their email account.

[Peter]

Yes, I'm going to do that with the next lot.  Thanks.

[Kim]

Internet 101:  You don't need access to someone's account to send emails from their address^[1].  It's just a header, you can put anything you like in it.  That's what cryptographic signatures are for.  (Yes, I know that nobody actually uses them.)


_{[1] Though other details (routing, SPF, etc) may reveal the message to be an obvious forgery.}

[drossall]

I always point out that email was developed by copying real mail. There are lots of similarities. One is the extent to which the sender address at the top of the message is iron-clad proof that it was indeed posted from there.