Part V: Hackers cracking sites & hijacking your email to send spam

If you missed them (and have way too much time on your hands) here are the other parts 1,2,3 and 4.

I decided to write a part 5 for all of the people coming in from search engines, digg, and reddit who are interested in information about having you site hacked and what you should watch out for.

ATTENTION WEBMASTERS:

Even if you get your site back up and running you may still need to watch out for this...

* Hackers may hijack your email account to send spam *

Our webpages that were hacked were running on a content management system (CMS) called PHPIZABI.

From what we can tell the hackers accessed some of the administrator functions through a whole in the older version of the program (this is why you always want the newest version!)

We were fortunate and they weren't able to or decided not to cause much damage.
But I suspect now that more than damage they might have been looking for email accounts to hijack.
Why do I suspect as much? Because I received this email in my gmail account:





This email came from the email that was registered on the admin page of the site that was hacked. I created this email account in cPanel, had the account been a gmail account I'm sure this would not have happened. I figure that they might be using some program to send out spam because since an email came to my other email account then the program must be emailing addresses from my address book.


In Good Company:

We are not alone by any means in having our email hijacked. Just check out this Google search:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hackers+hijack+email


The results include stories of popular sites like "million dollar website" and even WIKIPEDIA.org having their email accounts hijacked and abused to send spam and malware.


So what can you do if you are hijacked?

In my case I was fortunate again, I was barely using the email account that was hijacked so I just deleted it.



I researched some information on other actions one can take but it doesn't look hopeful:

http://www.mailsbroadcast.com/email.broadcast.faq/45.email.hijacked.htm



http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060918201000AAa071G

This search was a little better:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=fighting+email+hijack&btnG=Search

Sorry if that doesn't help,
-Tori