spammed while my Paypal account was hacked

So I woke up one normal day and checked my email. I was surprised to see thousands of new emails all spam. Like almost everyone, I get daily spam, but decently, like around thirty emails.

I had no idea what this is was all about, but it definitely looked odd.
Most of these emails were already in the bulk folder, but I like to double check, because legitimate stuff gets there occasionally.

So I start scrolling...
And after fifteen minutes, I've spotted something like "You have added a new credit card to your account". All of a sudden, I realised what was happening and I rushed to login into my Paypal. Surprise, surprise, some a few hundreds were missing as withdrawal on that new credit card.

Fortunately, I've reacted in time and Paypal was able to reverse the process so I got my cash back. Then they also helped with some logs and I've managed to investigate and find out how all this was possible:

Many years ago I have used on a forum the same email and password for creating an account. Yes, I know it was stupid, but I think that was even before having a Paypal account. Now it seems like someone hacked that forum(or maybe the admin/owner shared it on purpose who knows) and tried all those user/pass pairs on Paypal website. And at least on mine, it worked! So they wanted to grab quickly some cash, and they added their credit card. Then they spammed me. But the spammed itself triggered my alertness so I don't know if it was such a smart move.

How to protect yourself against keyloggers?

A keylogger will record everything you type so whoever installed it will know all your emails, conversations, logins, passwords and so on. Therefore if someone wants to spy on you, a keylogger is the first choice.

So you need to protect yourself and you are probably thinking of an anti-virus. But it is not enough and you should not rely on it! Even if you are 100% that your operating system is clean, there may be hardware keyloggers installed which could be impossible to detect. Don't panic, you have a few solutions:

1. You can use a virtual keyboard such as http://www.lakefolks.org/cnt/. It is a Click-N-Type keyboard designed for anyone with a disability, but it can be used against keyloggers, simply by clicking keys with the mouse whenever you have to write sensitive information such as passwords. Yes, it will be hard to write an email like this.


2. If you are familiar with Linux, you should make a copy of Knoppix(Knoppix is a bootable Live system on CD/DVD). Boot your computer with this and no matter how many keyloggers there are, you have your own read only operating system so you are safe... unless there are hardware keyloggers for which you should use the previous solution.

Strange myFxSearchImg:base64 code in wordpress posts

When writing and pasting text into a wordpress blog post, I found that some strange code like

<img style="border: medium none"
src="image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANS ......

was added automatically at the end of the post.
First thought was some trojan/virus. After looking deeper into it, I found it's only a Vista Aero(Firefox theme) error.

And that code is nothing but this image:




To fix this issue, either remove Vista Aero or update it to the latest version.