Hi all, I just wanted to check in here to see how many of you had this experience. Last night my spouse recieved a confirmation email from the CRA saying we had successfully added a passcode grid as a secondary Multifactor Authentication. We did not do this. Then came hundreds of spam emails flooding the email account.
It was super alarming watching this all go down in real time. I googled it (thanks Reddit) and found out that this "email bomb" is a spamming technique meant to bury the sensitive email in a sea of garbage. It was hundreds of emails from around the world in a variety of languages confirming either a sign up for some random newsletter or asking for multifactor authentication codes to complete signups for various accounts and websites. I combed through all of them and the only email of any value was the CRA one.
Thankfully we were able to log in and secure the CRA account, change all of our passwords and remove the grid authenticator option.
30 minutes after my spouse's email, I got one in my inbox, though there was no spam bomb behind mine for some reason.
Talking to my mom today, the same thing happened to her! So either my family has been targetted or some of you have too and can help me feel better.
We called the CRA today and they confirmed there had been no access into any of our accounts aside from us and no changes were made. No agent confirmed this as a known issue, though my agent knew about spam bombing email accounts and confirmed they were super annoying.
Did this happen to anyone else?
Edit: changed "spanking technique" to "spamming technique". This is not that kind of post, people.
Also, so people can learn from me before it's too late: I did find out my pc was infected with malware. I downloaded Malwarebytes and it found it right away, but took all night a most of the next day for me to get it off my PC. It's not enough to just quarantine it and delete it, I had to figure out all of the pieces because it kept reinstalling itself after deletion. Everyone take a moment to scan your PC and change your passwords once in a while! So all of this could be a very much "me" thing, which feels AWFUL.