I sent an email to a good friend of mine at approximately 4.00am Sunday Morning. Less than 12 hours later another friend contacted me and said he had been forwarded the email by the person I sent it to – it had his email address as the sender to prove it.. I thought this highly unlikely and asked the first person who insisted he had not sent or shown it to anyone else, in fact he had not been online since just after I sent him the email until an hour or so earlier.

I asked the second friend to send a copy of the received email to me in order for me to check the full header and determine the ip address of the sender, which he reluctantly (it seemed to me) did. When I checked the email header for the ip address from which it had been sent I found that it was the same as the one it had been forwarded to – the second friend! He pointed it out to me as soon as I received the copy and said this “anonymous” troublemaker was trying to make things even more upsetting.

However, since then I have been thinking about this. The fact that the full email and attachments were forwarded to someone else in the first place means that my email account must have been hacked into and the email taken from my sent file. This is the latest episode in a string of very unpleasant emails and fake pms. However what worries me most is the identical ip addresses and I need to know for definite if this is possible. I know that it is possible and fairly easy to change the email address to look as if it came from someone else, but I am unsure about changing one’s ip address in this way. Is it possible, if you have all the details, to change your ip address (maybe through manually configuring the TCP/IP) to make it look as if an email has been sent by someone else.

Grateful thanks in advance for your reply.

NeedKarma

Very unlikely. "Hacking" an IP does not mean that someone has access to your computer. For someone to access the Sent Items then they would ahve to open the program such as Outlook Express (you don't mention what kind of mail account it is). Spoofing the sender info is doable but still not for the generic computer user. basically, per the scenario you mention, your computer has not been hacked unless someone installed a keylogger.

Here is Curlyben's standard copy/paste for computer cleaning:

SassyKat

Apologies if I was unclear on several matters, let me add a few details. The original email was sent from one yahoo address to another, however the second friend uses Outlook for his email management. As regards computer competence level he works in Computing at Management level and has several high level qualifications in both Computing and IT. He also knows just about everything there is to know regarding my computer, including the Administrator password (now changed) as I sent it to him when I had major problems and he fixed it for me. He also knows every part of my ip and dns address as we speak by email almost every day.

I am completely up to date with both anti-virus and anti-spyware, I defragged my entire system only three days ago and I run CCleaner on an almost daily basis.

What I am most worried about is that the "anonymous troublemaker" and my second friend are one and the same person...

NeedKarma

Seems like social hack versus a computer hack. Nothing we can do from here.

SassyKat

Well all I was asking was whether or not what I asked is possible - ie whether a person can change their ip and dns address to someone else's to make it look as if the email came from them when it really didn't, that's all.

NeedKarma

One can spoof headers, though not easily. DNS server settings mean nothing, they are not secret nor is your IP.

Curlyben

Spoofing E-mail headers is scarcely straightforward.
Also bear in mind that using a webmail account such as Yahoo the header information relates to the e-mail server and not the person sending it.