Email Bug

[mikebell]

My niece visited a site and now my computer is infected. It sends messages - see below. I checked my email contacts and deleted a number of suspicious USA addresses. God knows how many it is sending out - I only learn of it when I get a Daemon-mailer. When I was infected I had Kasperski now I'm on Avast. How can I purge my computer?

'2011 ohwit.com Boxing Day Sale Now

Christmas is coming, and I wish you and your family a merry Christmas. I have found a shopping site: ohwit.com To promote the products for Christmas, all the products are sold on very low prices. There are phones, TVs, computers and some other electronic items. Take your time to see if there are the things that you need. From now to the Christmas day,as long as you buy 2 items,you can choose any one christmas decoration as a free gift .

What are you waiting for? Just check online!

Act quick! Those goods are sell hot and could be sell out!'

[Phil Conners]

Uhoh, sounds like you got a virus.

Assuming you're on a Windows PC I recommend you uninstall your Avast and install Microsoft Security Essentials. It's a free download.

[mikebell]

I will do as you suggest. Why did Kasperski not pick it up? Knowing my Thai niece she probably ignored the English warnings and over-ruled/disabled it. I've tried looking for it (the virus) and as I stated earlier found a number of email addresses from the US among my contacts which I know I didn't put there.

Thanks.

[Phil Conners]

I don't know, your guess is as good as mine.

[lopburi3]

How do you know you are sending these messages? They could easily have been sent from someone else and just using your return address - so if they bounce you will get the failure message but if they do not bounce receiver will believe it came from a real person (you). I am not saying you might not have become infected but most of these are not your computer but it just looks that way from the return address used on the spam messages. Was your computer even on-line at the time message was sent?

[JSixpack]

How do you know you are sending these messages? They could easily have been sent from someone else and just using your return address - so if they bounce you will get the failure message but if they do not bounce receiver will believe it came from a real person (you). I am not saying you might not have become infected but most of these are not your computer but it just looks that way from the return address used on the spam messages. Was your computer even on-line at the time message was sent?

Right. Should study over the RFC-822 headers and compare w/ your known IP addresses and mail servers.

[aarn]

After doing all the things suggested above, would be a good idea to change your email password, too.

I use hotmail (10+ years) and thrice the pword has been cracked.

You can check to whom you have sent the Spam by checking in your 'sent' box.

Most people know not to open emails tha thave nothing in the subject line...AA