Some Yahoo Messanger Concerns

Can you give a reliable online tool to communicate/chat with family and friends? If you are to ask me I'll probably answer the Yahoo Messenger. I practically grew up with that tool. Very reliable, you can store your friends' contact information and you can chat with them once they log in. Voice conference, Chat with cam, Etc. You can also receive offline messages from you contacts through your mobile phone. Pretty cool feature huh? Even though a lot of social networking sites already offer the same service, the Yahoo Messenger has still proven its worth. And Right now they have integrated it with your yahoo e-mail.

Recently, I noticed that some family members and a few of my friends started sending offline messages that I receive through my mobile. Some of them looked like advertisements and testimonials of commercial products that I haven't heard of. Like slimming capsules, etc. Some written on a different language. Indian maybe. At first I just ignore them thinking it's just a glitch or some isolated event but as I still keep receiving such messages from my various contacts it started to annoy me. That's when I started investigating. Everytime I receive messages that I thought was suspicious I tried contacting the sender through their mobile and they seem to be unaware of sending such messages. The Question now is, Is yahoo still reliable? If someone has already cracked your messengers password it means your entire yahoo account is compromised. Right?

Well I'm not a techy person but it would really ease my mind if someone could help me out with this concern. Im literate enough when it comes to sending and reading emails but beyond that I'm totally clueless. I'm just curious if this is happening to anyone but me but one thing im sure of. This should not be happening.

So for the mean time I have no choice but to regularly change my password. Better safe than sorry right? However will changing passwords regularly be enough once you accout has already been compromised?

Published on: May 21, 2009