Whether or not you use AOL, a recently exposed mass hack of the company's network promises trouble for everybody.
AOL (AOL) users: Hackers stole "a significant number" of email addresses, passwords, contact lists, postal addresses and answers to security questions, the company said in a blog post Monday. Anyone of the company's 120 million account holders might be affected. Judging by AOL's description of the incident, that total number could well be in the tens of millions. But AOL isn't giving any details about the incident for now..
Non-AOL users: Watch out for spam that looks like it came from you or your friends' AOL accounts.
It's a double whammy that's shows just how annoying hackers can be when they loot our contact lists.
Related story: Internet Explorer bug hijacks your computer
Hackers are doing something called email spoofing, and it's making it seem as if long-discarded AOL email accounts are back and sending spam. Emails appear to come from your friend's email address because the "From:" field shows their email address. But this spam is actually coming from someone else. Hooligans know who to send spam to because they have your contact list.
Although the massive hack likely affected untold millions, AOL estimates only 2% of its email accounts are being spoofed so far. So far, AOL has only been able to redirect these spoofed emails into people's junk mail folders.
