My email account was hacked into due to a hidden trojan - It can happen to you!!!!

**DrGonzo** · 12-13-2012, 01:45 PM

So yesterday I started getting alerts on my phone that emails were going out from my old Hotmail account. I have had that email account for almost 20 years now and only use it for paying bills and paypal. I don't send emails from the account at all.

I checked the emails going out and found out that the links were html redirects to a trojan keylogger program Avast shows it's called "HTML:Redirector-AI [TRJ]". Luckily I only had like 15 contacts in my account that they sent the email out to. Most of them were bad email address I haven't used in years and the others were spoof email addresses, like spoof@paypal.com. I quickly changed the password on the account and switched all my accounts over to use my gmail account.

So I got all my accounts locked down and switched over to the new gmail account for emailing. I flushed the hotmail account of all emails and contacts and set up a forwarded to gmail just so I capture any valid emails from accounts I missed.

I started doing some checking on my home computers to see if somehow I got a trojan keylogger installed. Sure enough my gaming/video rig had a damn trojan on it. I only found it by running a boot scan. System scan did not catch it..

The main file that brought the trojan in was Wondershare PDF Editor program "pdfeditor.exe". This was a PDF editor program I downloaded probably from Cnet "Download.com" some time ago. Luckily I don't use that computer much, but recently I started working from home twice a week and use it for general browsing and checking email which is how they got the password. Neither Avast or Spybot/TeaTimer caught the trojan when it installed.

So I am in the process of finishing a full system scan "3tb" and once that is done I have to re-image the machine fresh as I don't trust the virus programs from getting everything removed/cleaned. Since I don't know when the trojan was first installed I can't re-image from back up. So fresh install of everything........

I am a computer geek, I'll admit it. I spend 90% of my day on a computer. I am very system and network savvy. So even the best of us can get hacked....

**IPD** · 12-13-2012, 04:09 PM

yeah, my hotmail got hacked recently as well. not bad, considering i've never had any issues with it in the previous 15 years. only 5 people got spammed, and none of them were stupid enough to click on the link, so it's all good.

changed the PW to something even more obtuse than my own logic, and i sleep peacefully.

**Roybatty** · 12-13-2012, 04:52 PM

Hey bros go easy on the pr0n sites =p

Sent from garage

**Alan92RTTT** · 12-13-2012, 05:02 PM

Been there, Done that, Not fun.

I got nailed by a popup on a comic book news site. I knew it the moment it happened (saw the phone windows virus scanner) but by them its too late.

**DrGonzo** · 12-13-2012, 05:03 PM

LOL... the only Pr0n I watch it what Doc posts in the members area!!!

Just got finished with the fresh install..... now I have to re-install all the drivers and software!!

**GTOJOE** · 12-13-2012, 06:51 PM

In that case I would simply remove the HDD and connect it to another machine and run combofix, superantispyware and at-least 2 other good virus scanners over it.