5 ms·
I think we need more detailed information to identify the cause of the spamming...There could be several strategies to spam her contacts with her account, even
by 2510c39011c5 12y ago
I think we need more detailed information to identify the cause of the
spamming...There could be several strategies to spam her contacts with
her account, even with the facts that you listed (assuming fact No. 3
really is what it appears to be, as virus detection itself is an open
problem -- and in theory this problem is indeterministic).
2-factor authentication (with SMS) in place should be able to rule out
the possibility to have her account accessed somewhere else, other
than the computer and smart phone she uses. But there is also the
possibility that someone else obtained all the contacts in your
daughter's gmail, and then spam with a fake originating mail
server. The critical path for this attacking strategy does not involve
2-factor authentication and your machines.
Another scenario could be her iphone has been compromised and hence
have all the information stored on it exposed to the attacker,
including the SMS (and once the attacker obtained control of the
iphone, he/she could delete the text message and erase the trail after the attack). You need to
check the SMS record with the telecommunication SP to see if there was
any text message containing the 2-factor password sent from google to
your daughter's number.
But in the case either your daughter's mac or iphone has
virus in it, and you failed to find it out (which could happen to
anyone), this could be another possible cause.
At this time, perhaps we could also do several other things to mitigate the impact of this attack...
1) all the contacts she cares should be alerted about this account
compromise (there have been cases in the past where compromised
account has been used to swindle money).
2) change the gmail password.
3) check the vacation responder (e.g. auto-response) of the gmail
account (gmail settings -> General -> Vacation responder) see if it
has been cleared.
4) set different mail signature for all the different mail clients she uses (this could be done through each mail client's own configuration), and
also the signature for the gmail account (gmail settings -> General ->
signature), in the sense of marking the different critical paths of sending mail. So next time we could find out where (in terms of the
apps and client) the spam is sent from, in case it happens again.