Warning for BT Internet customers

We’ve recently received quite a few emails from people within the RISC OS scene which appear to be hacked/spam emails.

Typically, these emails are subject “hi rcomp” or similar, and contain a link to a (presumably) dangerous website.

My guess is that these people have had their accounts hacked, and address books stolen. The one thing they have in common is that (according to our customer database) they are all BTinternet customers. Now, BT sub-contract their email service to webmail providers, and I suspect these customers may have address books on those web services. BT have used Yahoo and Hotmail/Outlook as backend providers historically – I’m not sure which is the likely source.

Anyway, I’m writing as a general “bit of advice” to RISC OS users – if you receive a “hi ” email from a BT internet-using friend, be careful. Secondly, if you are a BT internet user, you might want to consider changing your password for security, or, you know, be wary of an ISP that can’t/won’t run its own proper email servers. Or at least, be careful of what you store on their webmail.

Yahoo! has security that is literally second to none (and only marginally better than none). It’s…a rather interesting hack. Less obvious than one might expect.

http://www.heyrick.co.uk/blog/index.php?diary=20150929
and
http://www.heyrick.co.uk/blog/index.php?diary=20150930

Yahoo’s security at the moment seems to be fairly good…. i.e. I think their services are broken!

I’ve had lots of these from BT customers. Most were on the lines of I’m on holiday and my passport and wallet are missing, please send me money so I can pay my hotel bill, as I’m leaving today.