Hacked accounts sending viruses?

[Tyciol]

I feel this issue needs to be brought out into the open, as I'd prefer not to be held accountable for something I haven't done. I received the following private message from Sage Daedalus:

Subject: virus?

Not to suggest that you did it, but I got an email from you with an attached this_message.com file or something like that, that was infected with a virus.

Care to explain?

I gave the following reply:

I'm afraid I can't... was this a private message or an e-mail message or what? I can't remember even e-mailing you... my memory is bad, so can you tell me if we've talked before, and if so on which thread?

You're most certainly not on any contact list, so this wouldn't be any automated virus. If you truly did get this, then someone must be abusing my account. I'll contact a moderator to try and get this fixed up. I'm generally not very concerned with protecting my security (lazy) so it might have been pretty easy for someone to hack or guess my password, I'll leave it up to them to find out.

So, as I've said, I am reporting this here for the moderators and bug investigators to look into. Hopefully you can find out what caused this concern.

[blackgen]

There are quite a lot of email viruses out there, that mail from a random email address (gathered from address books and even webpages) to a random email address. So, I guess Sage Daedalus, received such an email.
I hope Sage didn't open the attachment, as this would result in further propagation of the virus.

[Tyciol]

That's just the thing, I never open attachments, only sometimes occasionally the e-mail (which shouldn't do anything... right?)

[Grigori]

That's just the thing, I never open attachments, only sometimes occasionally the e-mail (which shouldn't do anything... right?)

Uh it depends on your system   it's best not to open it at all. As for the virus thing ... it's a good idea to run a few different virus scans over your system if you are not sure. However, odds are good that your name just happened to be chosen randomly to make it look like you sent it even though you didn't ... this is very simple to do and just involves the virus fiddling with a "reply" address.

[Chris_com28]

Well it seems your still not safe even if you never open attachments. Macro viruses can be used on HTML e-mails.

[MisterJingo]

It's safest to set email to text display only rather than html.