Spams sent to Contact list in GMail

A few days ago, I noticed that I have been get­ting return mes­sages in my GMail account. I opened one of it, and noticed that I was actu­al­ly send­ing out spams out to peo­ple in my con­tact list.

Think­ing that it might be spoofed, I checked my out­go­ing fold­ers, and to my sur­prised I found that I did sent out those emails. From my his­to­ry of so many ancient years of using the com­put­er, I have nev­er got infect­ed by a virus, or a mal­ware before. I have yet to had any of my accounts hacked. Dis­be­lieved, I surf around want­i­ng for an answer.

I noticed a pat­tern here. The spam mail that was sent, was sent to every­one in my con­tact list. It was sent in such a way, that I myself would not have done, if I were to send out spams. I checked around dis­cus­sion groups, and found out that I was­n’t the only one that had prob­lems. In fact, it was a known issue with GMail where mali­cious sites could grab your con­tact list from the JavaScript if you have the mali­cious sites in the same brows­er win­dow.

That pret­ty much explains it. I recalled that a cou­ple of days ago, I was surf­ing and down­load­ing tor­rent files of gay porns. There were cou­ple of win­dows that popped up, but most of them are blocked by my pop­up block­er that was build-in Opera brows­er.

The porn that was down­loaded was good actu­al­ly, but that is anoth­er sto­ry. One les­son to learn is that, even with big cor­po­ra­tion as big as Google, inse­cu­ri­ty can some­times hap­pen. No mat­ter how well a code is being cod­ed, a sim­ple line could have cause an issue as big as this.

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I guess from now onwards, before I start surf­ing for porns, I bet­ter make sure I do not log in to GMail, or even online bank­ing. Just in case.