I just installed Suse a few weeks ago and I'm still something of a newbie. I started getting strange messages showing up in my Yahoo email account, such as a returned email because it was detected as spam, and a delivery failure notice, as well, both of which I never sent. One of them is in the French language, where I hear that Suse is very popular. It looks like someone has access to my email account and is using it to send spam from, though there are no messages showing up in my Sent box. I could possibly just change my password, but then I am wondering if maybe someone can somehow be skimming or hacking my computer to find out my passwords.

It is possible if you use features like save passwords or remeber passwords and so on.
First thing to do is login to the yahoo account and change the password to a stronger type of one. Longer password, alphanumeric characters, no standard words.

I would check your logs to see if any unknown logins have happen. Also change your password on your suse account and root account while your at it. Check for unusally or new user accounts on system. Look at /etc/passwd file and see if others may have 0 level which root normally has. Not sure where users start in SUSE. Most Redhat clones users start at 500 on for UID. Check groups as well. This is a start many other ways in if some services are active.

Is this connected directly to a cable or dsl modem?
If so is there a firewall up?
If not get one up.
Or better yet get a firewall cable/dsl router and use that between comptuer and modem.

Brian1

This happened to one of my class mates yahoo id. We used to get porn stuff related mails from his email id at our yahoogroups id. And he never sent those mails. The cause is still unknown as now we are not getting any such mails.

1) Disable ssh or telnet service or limit it to any specific user/ipaddress if u need it. (and if u have it enabled)
2( Chabge all your local passwords eg (<hxJ37*k?>) is considered as a strong password. The length matters too as they mostly use brute force attach to crack passwrds (Once my local password was cracked by someone through ssh)
3) Change your email password from some other PC in case ur keys might be logged.
4) Still if this happens, you should report this to the email service provider.

It is hooked up directly to a cable modem, no router. I see a couple of firewalls installed, Susefirewall2 and yast2-firewall, though I am not really sure what exactly they cover. I found the one in Yast that seems to probably be up and running, but it doesn't look like there is much to configure.

I am also wondering if perhaps they are just using my email address as a return email address. I have used one of these email programs before, and you can plug in whatever return email address you want. If that is the case, I find it odd that I only received a couple of these. I am going to change my password and contact yahoo and see what they have to say.

if you have an old computer lying around (and it can be extramly old i use a celeron 400 with a 2.5GB HDD) i woul recoment IPCOP if you dont want to fork ouit the money for a router

download it from www.ipcop.org
forum on ipcops.com

but a cheap NAT router will take up less space/ make less noise

If you are unsure about a firewall then I would go get a cheap firewall router no wireless and put that on the modem and then connect computer to router. Best cheapest, quickest way to get secure.

Brian1

i agree with brian,
though the chances are that you yahoo account has been compramised at the server side rather than at your computer...
ny hotmail account was totlly compramised once by some idiots who managed to crack the encryption uised by MSN