Suspicious activity in my email

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Not quite a Newb Joined: 28 Dec 2009 Posts: 26

Over the past few days I've noticed highly suspicious activity in my main email account, which is a web-based hotmail account. As over this time period, I've had large numbers of delivery notification failures to my hotmail inbox which contain spam like messages featuring an attachment and word salad( I have not opened any of the attachments sent to my mail box), I've also noticed that the spam emails are ether forwarded to other people throughout the world, or are sent directly from me. This is suspicious enough for me, however today when I went to check my morning mail, I found that my inbox had an even larger number of spam attachment emails sent(again ether from me directly or forwarded from my box.In addition, even more alarming when I went to check my sent box I've confirmed that a sizable quantity of these spam messages where sent using my hotmail account.

I don't see how my account could have been compromised, as I have very strong and very regularly updated antivirus, anti-hacking, anti-phishing, etc the works in terms of protection. Also I follow good web protocol and never open anything from an unfamiliar sender etc, never look at sketchy inappropriate websites.

So I'm trying to figure out how my hotmail account could have been compromised like this?

However recently my university has come under frequent spam, phishing, hacking, an denial of service attacks so that is one possible cause of this I figure? Especially, since my university's web browser requires you to download a program every time you log on in order to access the internet.

* Mind you this is my personal email, not my baiting one. Also I don't think it was a lad who has been messing with it(although maybe a vlad because some of the messages have been coming back in Russian).

Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2010 12:21 am

maybe change your password ??????

Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2010 12:23 am

The word "botnet" rings in my head when I read this.

Not quite a Newb Joined: 28 Dec 2009 Posts: 26

scambuster3 wrote:

maybe change your password ??????

Already done,

Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2010 8:43 am

Sounds like someone is spoofing using your email, but that woulcdn't show up in your sent folder. Confused

I'm not ofay with hotmail workings. Does it have any kind of log file you can view?

Elite Baiter Joined: 19 Apr 2008 Posts: 1301

As windypops wrote either your email address is being spoofed or you have a spambot.

1. Change the password which you've already done.
2. Have a look in the 'sent' box to see if you are the originator of the messages.
3. If you are then you have a spambot and you'll need to check your computer. It is amazingly easy to fall prey to spambots despite taking all precautions. You can get them by visiting rogue web sites as well as clicking on attachments in your email.
4. If you are not the originator and you are being spoofed there isn't much you can do I'm afraid.

Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2010 9:45 am

@matador

You have described exactly something that happened to a friend's Hotsnail account.

We did just about everything that the others have suggested, but the spam sending still continued Confused

What we ended up doing was to delete all the contacts in the Contact List, changed the password again and it stopped.

Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2010 2:42 pm

I have a friend who has recently had problems with hotmail. He has scanned and rescanned for virus and whatever but the problem persists. I am trying to convince him to rid himself of HotMail and go to Gmail.

Elite Baiter Joined: 19 Apr 2008 Posts: 1301

Spambots can be really hard to trace. As people have commented even changing the password may not help. The reason is that the bot becomes active during the email session and uses the existing legit logon to spread their spam. Check the outbox for spambot activity.

I'm not advocating one AV checker against another but if one doesn't find anything another might. One particularly good one is Super Anti Spyware (SAS) which is free. Don't use an online AV scanner - they'll misidentify anything in order to persuade you to buy them.

When something similar happened to me the malware was actually a "hosting worm" which allowed other spambots or malware to connect to it to use its "services".

However I think we are getting slightly off topic. This is are spam not scan.

Posted: Wed Nov 24, 2010 4:14 pm

pete515 wrote:

Don't use an online AV scanner - they'll misidentify anything in order to persuade you to buy them.

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ is the answer.

Posted: Wed Nov 24, 2010 4:31 pm

I'm more of an Avast person. It has a boot up scan [which i never use but useful if you have sneaky startup apps]monitors port 80, as well as mail clients and other comm ports. Pretty nifty, and free also.

If you think you have something embedded in your system, Malwarebytes is a pretty good program for cleaning things up if it gets a little messy.

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