Email Under Attack

saabga

Hey Guys, I'm hoping you can help me, the company i work for have changed the computer/server support company we use, and in the last few weeks i have noticed that someone seems to be hacking into my hotmail account & sending out spam to personal & business contacts!! :mad:

We did have a virus in system but was told that it was cleaned up, Help!!

Ponster

Sounds like you or your company has a trojan installed somewhere that is remembering people's hotmail passwords.

Change your Hotmail password and don't log in again on your companies computers.

You won't be able to do anything else as it's not you who is able to scan these servers for a problem.

Javan

saabga wrote: »

Hey Guys, I'm hoping you can help me, the company i work for have changed the computer/server support company we use, and in the last few weeks i have noticed that someone seems to be hacking into my hotmail account & sending out spam to personal & business contacts!! :mad:

We did have a virus in system but was told that it was cleaned up, Help!!

I'd guess the two most likely possibilities are: someone is sending email from their own server with your hotmail address as the 'From' header. In that case the only thing you can do is try to find out who is sending the messages and from where. Get one of the spam emails and look at all the header information. There should be 'Received By' headers that track the message's passage through the SMTP system, and you can use that to find out where the message originates. You might be able to send an email to the administrator of that server asking them if they can stop the spam. Of course, if the spammer has their own server then this is fairly useless. You might be able to send an email to the spammers ISP, but there are a lot of ISPs out there that just don't care.

Or perhaps someone has your hotmail password. Change it!

thebman

You may want to consider report it to the IT department.

Biggins

The virus that was on the server might have passed on you contact email addresses to the spammer from your account. This (to me) is the most likely cause.

The only other route is yourself to inform everyone on your contact email list, that your server was infected and any supposed mail coming from yourself with your present OLD INFECTED email address from a certain date should be considered spam entirely.

Go get a totally new Hotmail account (thus new email address). Inform in your email to your contacts that "this" is your new email address and everything else is NOT from you, that any old address email from yourself, should re automatically re-directed to trash or a spam section on their (incoming/outgoing) mail management applications.

Why fight (with the spammer) over a email address that is now compromised.
Get a new one completely. You will be doing your contacts a favor too.
They will be much easier able to filter out the spam supposedly coming from yourself.

Good Luck.

9233fh

I have the same problem and it's driving me crazy!!! :mad: My e.mail account is also with Hotmail. However, none of the computers I use to log onto my hotmail account have had a virus. I hate all my contacts getting this spam in my name! :mad: Is your message being sent from China advertising shops???? When the first message was sent to all my contacts, my address book was emptied. It was as if someone had stolen my identity and my contacts! Another message has been sent today to the few contacts I had re-entered in my address book. I think at this stage, I'm just going to set up another account :(