My daughter got a weird email from a friend. She says their email hasn't been working properly and that someone sent the email using their address as sender. Some sort of virus. Also, the hacker or virus added some comments from the girl, they knew the color of her eyes. How is that possible and can the hacker or the virus affect our computer?
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Sending an email which seems to come from another email address is called email address spoofing. It is relatively very simple to do and is difficult to detect. The problem is in the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) i.e the protocol used for sending messages. The SMTP doesn't authenticate before sending an email though various mail servers implement this protocol with some sort of authentication. So in short i can send you a mail with a sender address of bill.gates@microsoft.com, but that doesn't mean that i have compromised Bill's email or I have some how hacked into Microsoft infrastructure. This is an industry wide issue and companies are working to come up with solutions for it. Yahoo has something called domain keys for this purpose, different vendors have a different solution but there is no industry wide solution. It will be good to practice safe browsing and follow simple precautions. Or in your daughter's case just ignore it or block that particular friend's email address by assigning it a spam status.
I know its not helpful, but thats exactly why we have so much SPAM.
Because malicious programs can grab the info from the address files that are stored on the computer..
Generally they can't if you don't open any programs/attachments. Files can be read so if the computer contained a poem or story that mentioned her eyecolor they'd use it to sound more authentic. Alot of hacking is making people think you know more than you do. E-mail security is an illusion. You can send e-mail from any address reguardless of whether you have the password or not. Also, a big problem now with built in cameras is hackers/viruses can give hackers access to them, so be sure if it's not in use, it's covered.