Spoofed web based email

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I have an AOL email address that I use to sign up for message boards or commenting on news sites and it started sending my main e-mail spam mail. However I do not see any items on the sent folder.

I am familiar with how worms worked on e-mail addresses on regular mail clients etc and how it can send to your contact list however I did not think this was possible on web based e-mails.

If my e-mail is only getting spoofed how is it sending to my contacts?

Does anyone know how this works? Just curious.

Thanks

 

[Ryland]

I have seen this happen on my friends Yahoo accounts but dont know how its occurring.

 

[seepy83]

Like you said, it's spoofed. It's probably not actually coming from Yahoo. Look at the message headers for one of the emails you received in your "main e-mail", and see if they trace back to a Yahoo mail server. They probably don't.

So, if it's spoofed, why is it actually going to your contacts? One way or another, your contacts list/address book was harvested. I've seen a significant increase in this recently, but I don't know what's causing the increased contact harvesting to occur. Part of me thinks it's due to Apps/Games that people are installing on their smartphones. Many apps ask for a ridiculous amount of permissions, including reading contacts. But that's just a theory...I have no proof that people are actually using that for evil like this.

 

[John Connor]

There is malware that will hijack your contacts.

 

[TheSandman21]

AOL's email service got hacked somewhere at the server level.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/04/22/aol-email-hacked/8003859/

Some think it might have been a server storing transaction logs, I personally think that AOL is SCREWED on this one. This is an epic security fail, especially if this guy is correct:

http://www.brianalvey.com/news/2014/04/21/aol-address-books-hacked/

 

[Chiefcrowe]

i've been getting some aol spam lately too.. ugh what a mess indeed. I guess they could try to find out who is behind it and shut down the botnet...hmm

 

[Virgorising]

I just checked, everything here appears normal.

 

[Aldon]

Outlook seems to be affected. I think every email provider is. Hotmail and MSN pretty much messed up everything and granted everyone (with X amount of contacts) to be in their contact list automatically. Of course, that's reasonable if they merge their service together.

There are numerous algorithms and theories regarding on how to prevent spam.