Consumers of Virgin Media Suspect Hacking

The customers of Virgin Media believe that their electronic mail accounts have been hacked, and spam posts are being sent out from their IDs to the people who are in their contact list, according to a pc-pro report dated November 22, 2011.

A customer has written on the Virgin's Media forum thread that someone hewed the contacts in his webmail. The user got to know about it when he received a post from his son stating that he (son) had been spammed by him (the user).

Another customer posted on the forum that he also had the similar experience on November 5, 2011. He said an email was sent to everyone from his Virgin account. He ran virus and malware scans on his system, but apparently, everything was fine. Thus, it appeared that the servers were hacked.

However, Virgin Media continued to refute the security breach at first, stating that passwords were hacked by spammers through Brute force or Dictionary attacks, and this could happen to any user on any of the Internet provider, according a report of ispreview.co.uk.

But, on November 23, 2011, Virgin Media confirmed that several customers' webmail accounts have been seized apparently by Brute force or Dictionary attacks. These accounts were supposed to have been commandeered for sending out junk posts to other people in the contact list.

Consequently, the Company's Internet Security Team has asked the affected customers to log in to 'My Virgin Media' on its official website, and fill in their email password along with security question. It is also advising the customers to run an entire virus scan on their systems.

A team member from the Virgin Support team has issued a warning while posting on an online forum and recommended netizens to change their passwords also. However, the forum posters also accepted the fact that while running antivirus software tests, no news for virus were recorded.

Additional investigations on the matter revealed similar complaints by the G-mail and Yahoo Mail users, prevalent since the last month (October 2011).

In conclusion, people are recommended towards modifying the passwords for their accounts. These passwords should include alpha numeric characters.

Related article: Consumer NZ Website Encounters Hack

» SPAMfighter News - 11/29/2011