The AM Forum

My ham call hotmail account has been hacked so if any of you receive a begging message please ignore.  The one I got from "self" to self was in poorly written English along with the usual scam.

Upon re-entering the account I found it with Arabic script for all the commands along with a combination of my old messages and a few newer ones in Arabic. It has been a couple of weeks until I caught on that my password attempts along with requests to change them were set-ups.

Can't close the account easily even using another English version as a model. Only one page gets changed back to English from what I've read on searches.

So I'll continue plugging away to delete it. No banking or serious account stuff on the hotmail account so I managed to rearrange all the messages, found a bunch of other Arabic email accounts, assumed friends of the perp, and randomly wussed unknown commands into those accounts, etc. if that's what happened.  Opened and control X'd a bunch of hypertext source code.  Haven't tried to get back in today. Probably changed my password again.

Trouble with this sort of hack is that Microsoft doesn't know who to believe.

So don't use same passwords for sensitive accounts, etc.  They seem to go after professional or club lists such as hams, Rotarians, Lions, engineers, etc.

Any others with same problem? 

There was a little epidemic of this a couple of months ago with the result showing up as spam on some of the mailing lists.  For the last week every morning at work I find voicemail from a heavily mideastern accented person trying to sell me pharmaceuticals so it seems like a lot of spam activity is starting to come from this part of the world.

We were getting bombarded with phone calls, and the heavy accented male voice knew my first name, telling me that we need to turn on our computer and he would work with us to track down a serious virus. He claimed to be a Microsoft technician.
Fred

Had the same thing about 2 weeks back.  If you want his phone number, maybe I can find it.  I told him I would call back.

lemme guess. it's 202-555-5555?

More fun with account. Learning Arabic the hard way. When I model the pages from another English account on different computer, I see Microsoft even takes the trouble to list English right hand columns on the left of the screen in Arabic.  Arabic reads from right to left.

Other interesting things found and rechanged by me since I'm not going to use the acct. normally again. Some deep down pages were still in English.

Date of birth found changed was July, '87.  I wish.  I Changed it to a 1909 date.
Gender found was female, changed it to non specific.
Home found as US, (uh huh.). Changed that to Tonga.
City found was Richmond, State, Va.  Changed those to San Diego, CA.
Country/region found was Uganda.  This one I believe had to be accurate for web purposes and probably reflects the true hacker.  I changed this one to Virgin Is.
The unique ID, a sixteen didgiter, wasn't changeable, another reason I'll never use this account again.

I thought of leaving a specific religious message or two but don't want the hounds of hades seriously rising against more of my stuff.

You can bet I changed my other accounts to passwords not remotely resembling the old one on this account.  Funny how close all the old ones were.  Easily guessed stuff to common words and counts.  Where's the N s a when you need them? Urk.