Unwelcome Messenger 'Contact'

[Inertia_]

Received this out of nowhere at 1.55 this morning:

[email protected] says:
you have machanical limbs
[email protected] says:
poop
[email protected] says:
loser
[email protected] says:
crotch liker
Duncan Harris says:
it's 'mechanical', you spanner
[email protected] says:
whats a spanner you loser
[email protected] says:
suck me

Bizarre.

[fifty?ballz]

Man thats wierd.

Run services.msc and choose disable messenger service from the list and you
should stop receiving matey.

[Super Stu]

Received via windows/msn messenger or plain dialogue box?

[Magnakai]

One would assume it's MSN Messenger, seeing how he said something back.

[Siri]

Strange. Anyway, a good old Block/Delete combo will sort the little tyke out.

also: 'crotch liker', man, what a typo.

[Inertia_]

Got a message from the same source the next day to the effect of:

"Sorry, my kids were using the computer last night. I'm so, so sorry. I know you don't believe me, but I really am."

Still doesn't really explain why they chose me to be the lucky recipient of their ill-formed abuse. Someone also kept signing into my account on a different computer, cutting me off in the process. I switched from Windows Messenger to MSN, changed my password and now everything's peachy.

[Super Stu]

One would assume it's MSN Messenger, seeing how he said something back.

Yes, indeed.

Which is why I assumed turning off the messenger service as suggested above would be pointless.

[superkully]

Someone also kept signing into my account on a different computer, cutting me off in the process.

Somone got your MSN password? That's scary...

[capcom_suicide]

Somone got your MSN password? That's scary...

Hmmm....

I would check for keyboard loggers and/or local trojans. Check to see if anything is "Outbound" on your firewall log. Use a secure workstation, i.e behind a firewall, and full AV/adaware, and then change any web passwords you have. Be sure to use password "phrases" like:

?th1s1smyl0ngpa55Word? (this is my long password)

Easy to remember, hard to brute force attack.

Avoid using passwords which are only one word. These are hard to remember and easy to crack

Sounds a bit like a "Script kiddie" attack to me.

EDIT Unless MSN logs you off if someone TRIES to login on another PC, even if they don't have the passsword. this is a common DOS attack on windows networks. Try as the user (using their user@domain) three times and you lock the account. So they may have just been messing with you, without having the actual pass. I don't know if MSN works in this way.

/C_S

[Super Stu]

Was talking about this last night in #animebots.

A work colleague of mine had an interesting system - he would have a post-it on his screen with a password suffix, like "red", "wednesday", "bob" etc. Every time novell forced a password change, he would append a random work like this to a word he knew and obviously never wrote down. Couldn't possibly forget his password and more secure than using the same password for all, which a lot of folk do.

A more secure system, falling short of just having a random alphanumeric string for every password you use, would be to append said random digits to that keyword that only you know. Could safely write these down (not on your computer), like "yahoo mail - dfg87d" or whatever.

Unless you're good at remembering countless 10 digit random strings ;p

Sorry, completely OT. Just thinking out loud.