AOL Mail Hacked Seriously

Wltx.com reported on 22nd April, 2014 stating that AOL Mail, previously known as American Online, is a free email service provider by AOL has been hacked due to which many users have complained that their accounts are being used to send spam emails to others.

Although AOL has confirmed the hacking about which thousands were complaining on Twitter but still it is not known how much the issue is widespread.

It appears that scammers are just spoofing accounts of users rather than compromising them according to explanation by AOL in a help page as "spoofing is when a spammer sends emails using your email address as sender. Actually idea is to make the email look like coming from you so that receiver is tricked to open it."

The company said that these emails are not sent from AOL and don't have any contact with the AOL Mail system but their addresses are edited to look like that way. Actually these messages are sent from spammer's email account using the spammer's email server.

AOL mail explained how to find that you have been affected by checking your inbox if there is any bounced back emails which you never sent. Or any of your friends has been nice enough to alert you about spam messages being sent from your account. To find out if you have been hacked or spoofed, you need to check your sent messages: if there are sent emails which you did not send then you are hacked and if there is nothing then you are spoofed.

The spoofed emails were littered with links to the common spam sites advertising diet fads and nostrums and have been identified in large volumes which have made AOL to stop the tide.

AOL is asking users to change their passwords and be careful about sketchy emails to avoid falling prey to such phishing scams.

Latimes.com published news on 21st April, 2014 quoting AOL as saying that it takes the safety and security of its clients extremely seriously and it is actively attending complaints of consumers to resolve the problem of account spoofing so that users can keep and run their accounts securely and smoothly.

» SPAMfighter News - 5/1/2014