My Yahoo account was stolen and recovered, but now I'm getting suspicious emails. What should I do?

First, congratulations on getting your account back. Many people do not, and
end up losing the account permanently. That your contacts are gone is not
terribly surprising, though.

The real question that you might be asking yourself is “what else did they
do with my email account while they had control of it?”. Unfortunately, we may
never know.

So, what to do?

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First, you should never, ever “unsubscribe” from email to which you did not actually subscribe. Spammers often use that as a way to validate that the email address they’re throwing spam at is actually being read by a real, live person. Unsubscribe, and you’ll probably end up getting even more spam.

Second, it’s very likely that it’s not your computer that was compromised, just your Yahoo account. They managed to login to your account via the web from their own computer(s). Your computer was probably never involved.

I have to say “probably”, because of course things like spyware could have caused the problem in the first place – perhaps spyware on your machine allowed them to capture your password, for example. But typically these kinds of account compromises involve only the account, on the web, and nothing on your computer.

Typically.

Now, someone else had your account for some period of time, and clearly they were using it at a minimum to send these bogus “I’m trapped in the UK” emails to your contacts.

What else did they do?

You’ll never know.

You can, of course, scan the sent mail folder to see if there’s anything interesting in there, but I’m guessing there won’t be. If they were able to get your account and wipe out your contacts, they were probably smart enough to erase anything that might have been placed in the sent mail folder while they had it.

So who knows what they did.

Of greater concern might be what else they did to your account. While they had access to your Yahoo account they had access to everything you keep in it. That could be any of the other services beyond email that Yahoo provides, as well as many services that allow you to use your Yahoo login for access.

You should check them all.

Similarly you should check your profile and account information for any personal information that may be kept there. The thieves may have that. You should remove it all, or change it, immediately to prevent the thieves from regaining access to your account. (I strongly suggest you read Is changing my password enough? – the answer is a resounding “No”.)

And of course, at a minimum it sounds like you’re getting more spam after your adventure. That’s not something you can really do much about.

In your shoes, I’d consider the account irreparably compromised. I would not delete it (eventually someone else could inherit your old email address), but I would remove all associations to other services, remove all personal information, and simply stop using it on any regular basis.

I’d create a new account and check the old one only periodically for email from people that don’t have your new address.