Possibly hacked?

1,040 Views | 2 Replies | Last: 7 yr ago by aggolfer
Stasco
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AG
Got an odd one for the Nerdery board to solve.

I have an ancient Thinkpad x200 that I use as a linux box (Linux Mint), mostly for homebrewing software and brew data, and occassional other random utilities. The laptop has been completely shut off for the last week and a half. Today I booted it up, opened Firefox (normally I use chrome, but today I opened Firefox just for grins) and went to gmail. Gmail autologged into an account that I have never seen or heard off: the address is ppgsanantonio@gmail.com, and the associated name is Pedro Gllgo. Both of these are completely foriegn to me. The account just has one email in the inbox - the welcome to gmail message you get when you first sign up.

Here's the weird part. I checked the usage statistics - the only logins into the account have been today, and two logins from 2 days ago. Like I said, this is the first time I've even booted the laptop up in almost two weeks. It's been sitting in a box.

Any thoughts? Is this some kind of weird gmail glitch? Is this a sign of a hack? How would that even be possible?
akaggie05
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AG
Where else have you used Firefox? Firefox has a sync feature that will store browsing history, open tabs, passwords, etc. between sessions. If you used Firefox elsewhere in a way that was linked to the same Firefox account, and your credentials were stolen (keylogged, for example) then it's possible that someone else has been browsing as "you" on another computer, likely hoping to be able to walk right in to pre-authenticated accounts at various sites. If this is the case, when you started up Firefox on your dormant laptop, it dutifully synced up the browsing history and newly-cached credentials for the gmail account and auto-logged in.
Stasco
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AG
I had that thought as well, but I rarely use firefox on the linux machine, and I am definitely not logged into a firefox account on it.
aggolfer
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AG
Check your Firefox on your other devices
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