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Some people on my email contact list have been receiving phishing emails that appear to come from someone else on my contact list. The people receiving the emails and the person purportedly sending the emails are not themselves contacts.

If people on my contact list were receiving phishing emails from my account I would just conclude that my email was hacked, but what should I make of the fact that the emails are coming from this other email? Specifically, is it a "known" procedure for attackers to send phishing emails to a contact list, pretending to be someone else on the same contact list? I guess the attacker's assumption is that people on the same contact list will know each other?

user252164
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This was a common facet of Emotet, which would not only send spam to people found in your address book, it would also quote older emails of yours to act as Bayesian poisoning. While Emotet has been seized and shut down by authorities, its techniques are not unique.

A piece of malware infecting a computer can harvest contacts. It might be your computer, it might be somebody else in your address book. If you're seeing crosses between contacts of yours that do not know each other, it's probably you (update your a/v, disconnect from the network, reboot, then do a full system scan. If you still find nothing, consider professional assistance since some malware will corrupt your system in order to evade detection once it's installed).

Another possibility is that the attacker is harvesting addresses from public archives of mailing lists.

Adam Katz
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This is call Hoaxes. This is not limited to email. Even sometimes you may receive chat messages from your friend through messenger, but actually he has not sent that particular message. This is type of virus.

One of most dangerous type of virus and it is very difficult to detect even modern antivirus. I have heard that virus call "good times" released on 1994 and still circulate through internet.

Please refer this link for more information.

link2

Infra
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