Has anyone else been getting “fake” messages sent by newly-made / dormant / well-established IPCT accounts?

[Arjun]

Has anyone else been getting “fake” messages sent by newly-made / dormant / well-established IPCT accounts?

Sometimes I’ll see a private message and it gets deleted; then I also see messages from well-establisher users here but not sure if they are aware their forum account being potentially compromised

 

[alastairstevenson]

Has anyone else been getting “fake” messages sent by newly-made / dormant / well-established IPCT accounts?

A few weeks back we had a spate of spam posts from moderately active forum members who'd registered a few years back.
Usually spam posts are from very new accounts, and get spam cleaned, but in these cases just the posts were deleted as it looked like the accounts had been compromised, and it wouldn't be right to zap regular contributors.

I speculated that the passwords that the accounts were created with had been compromised elsewhere, and someone has used a bot to find out what else they could access.

If you've never done it - you might get a worrying surprise if you check whether your email address or passwords have been subject to a data breach -

Have I Been Pwned: Check if your email address has been exposed in a data breach

Have I Been Pwned allows you to check whether your email address has been exposed in a data breach.

haveibeenpwned.com

 

[Arjun]

A few weeks back we had a spate of spam posts from moderately active forum members who'd registered a few years back.
Usually spam posts are from very new accounts, and get spam cleaned, but in these cases just the posts were deleted as it looked like the accounts had been compromised, and it wouldn't be right to zap regular contributors.

I speculated that the passwords that the accounts were created with had been compromised elsewhere, and someone has used a bot to find out what else they could access.

If you've never done it - you might get a worrying surprise if you check whether your email address or passwords have been subject to a data breach -

Have I Been Pwned: Check if your email address has been exposed in a data breach

Have I Been Pwned allows you to check whether your email address has been exposed in a data breach.

haveibeenpwned.com

This is why I recommend changing passwords frequently year round - welcome to the Digital
Age