Every One In My Hotmail Contacts Have Received Spam .

[micky44]

hi there, can any one shed any light on this problem please, every one in my hotmail contacts have received a spam email, saying its from me , trying to say im selling guccis watches !!!!!!! i am running avg 8.5 done a scan no virus, whats this all about please? what can i do to stop it please, luskily it was only selling watches, god forbid it could of been something more sinister and my poor old mum would not of been happy !!!!! cheers, micky.

[Maverell]

You have probably unwittingly given out your Hotmail / MSN username and password......... Change your account passwords - hotmail, msn etc

[YouYouYou]

This also happened to two seperate friends of mine who sent me E-mails with an attachment from a company in China selling cheap IT stuff.

Mmm, hopefully the teccy's can help you out, but one suggestion is someone has got hold of your password (and thus use your account)....so change your password now!. I'm not saying this is the solution, just an idea to stop your account being hijacked.

Good luck

^^^Maverell beat me to it as I was typing a reply ....so do that!

Edited August 8, 2009 by YouYouYou

[Maverell]

I don't like to differ... but

The OP states that ALL his hotmail CONTACTS have received the spam email. Publishing your email address somewhere does not give access to your contact details.

[cdnvic]

i am running avg 8.5 done a scan no virus

Try scanning with a better antivirus.

http://www.eset.com/onlinescan/

[micky44]

hi, thanks for all your advice, iv;e changed my password, and done the recommended scan, no virus was found. how strange ! thanks once again, Micky.

[webfact]

hi there, can any one shed any light on this problem please, every one in my hotmail contacts have received a spam email, saying its from me , trying to say im selling guccis watches !!!!!!! i am running avg 8.5 done a scan no virus, whats this all about please? what can i do to stop it please, luskily it was only selling watches, god forbid it could of been something more sinister and my poor old mum would not of been happy !!!!! cheers, micky.

This points to your issue

Open this link

http://windowslivehelp.com/community/t/82201.aspx

Click on the link in the second post. (there are only 2)

If you can't open it - here's the link

http://windowslivehelp.com/solutions/safet...nt-hijacks.aspx

Edited August 8, 2009 by webfact

[jackdanielsesq]

They hijacked [gawd - I hate that word] ya phonebook

BR>Jack

[micky44]

great link thanks, but strange when i did 2 scans, nothing showed up ?

[pete_r]

If you can't open it - here's the link

http://windowslivehelp.com/solutions/safet...nt-hijacks.aspx

The explanations in this link are one possibility; something similar happened to the Hotmail account of my wife 3 months ago. In her case her password was changed, so she completely lost access to her account. The strange bit is that she had not logged in to that account for about 2 years, having moved to a Yahoo e-mail address; meaning that if it was a virus that stored her login information, the spammer behind it waited a jolly long time before making use of it.

It makes me wonder if instead of a virus it could be a weakness in the MSN ID check process in case of forgotten password that allows the spammer to get hold of account login information.

[xerostar]

I run a series of web sites and some have been running for over 10 years.

Unfortunately I placed the email address in the contact pages (not my personal address).

e.g. webmaster@????.com

That was in the days before spoofing.

Spammers use bots to crawl the web, finding my email addresses.

Now a huge amount of spam looks like it comes from my web sites.

I get a lot of hate mail from angry internet users blaming me for the spam!

I'm angry too because I get the same spam with my domain addresses at the top!

I could never send genuine email from my web sites because spam filters would immediately stop it.

I have changed the addresses to the "at" format (not using the"@" symbol)

but it seems like there is nothing you can do about it once the cat is out of the bag.

ID theft is rife on the net.

.

[stumonster]

not saying it happened here but if you carefully read the terms of service for some of the social networking sites you might find that you have given them permission to access your hotmail etc to help you by sending an email to each of your contacts telling them how much you want to see them on the social network. They will normally use the username and password you signed up with and try them at common webmail logins.

but yes , change your hotmail password and send out a BCC email to all your contacts advising them of what happened and apologising.