Help with hijacked email

[Mayor]

Something has hijacked my email and sent a message to everyone in my address book. It's one of those "hello friends".... with the message body being some kind of product discount site. How do i get rid of this. It's happened several times. I have active virus protection, I run Spybot, and I've changed my email password.

Thanks for any advice

Merry Christmas

[jledou]

A couple of other suggestions would be to clean out cookies and try a program called malwarebytes.

Merry Christmas Johnny and good luck.

[mosesbotbol]

Are the messages actually being sent from your Outbox? Run anti-spyware programs. If using Windows, try downloading and/or just running Windows Defender.

It's happened to most of one time or another.

You may want to consider web based email programs so there's nothing to hijack on your local PC.

[Riff Raff]

Originally Posted by mosesbotbol

Are the messages actually being sent from your Outbox? Run anti-spyware programs. If using Windows, try downloading and/or just running Windows Defender.

It's happened to most of one time or another.

You may want to consider web based email programs so there's nothing to hijack on your local PC.

I concur with all the above. Also, your computer may not be the culprit believe it or not! Someone you know may have your email address in their address book and their computer has been made a zombie. That means spyware/malware may have been installed on their computer and using your email address to disguise itself.

If you can find the times when the emails are sent out and make sure you turn your computer off when you aren't using it, then you will know if it is your computer or not.

Hope this helps.

[poker]

Originally Posted by Riff Raff

I concur with all the above. Also, your computer may not be the culprit believe it or not! Someone you know may have your email address in their address book and their computer has been made a zombie. That means spyware/malware may have been installed on their computer and using your email address to disguise itself.

If you can find the times when the emails are sent out and make sure you turn your computer off when you aren't using it, then you will know if it is your computer or not.

Hope this helps.

Thats probably more likely.