Help ... my email account has been hijacked by a spammer

08/08/03 | Self

[clamper1797]

It appears that my MSN email account has been hi-jacked by a spammer. Yesterday I started getting "mail undeliverable" messages from MSN. When I reviewed these messages I found that they were sent to people I don't know in an alphabetic manor. I have since virus scanned my computer with corporate Norton (none detected) and changed all my passwords. I am also behind a hardware firewall at work and a software firewall (McAfee) at home

Does anyone out here have any experience with this or advise about it ???

[Unknown Freeper]

did you update your virus definition file before you did the scan?

[Bikers4Bush]

Had the same thing happen to my hotmail account.

I let the folks in charge know about it and it has since stopped.

[clamper1797]

Yes I did

[clamper1797]

I sent several abuse messages to Hotmail and all I get back is some stupid auto-respense message

[Alouette]

This is called "spoofing." If you look at the full headers you will see that this spam was sent through an "open relay" server, not through your email host server. Spambots will pick up random email addresses and then insert someone else's email in the "from field" so they don't get any bounces.

My biggest question about spammers is how do they make any money? If they go to such trouble to hide their tracks, how do they receive the payment from the handful of suckers who actually do want to have a LARGER P*N*S?

[Asclepius]

I had something similar happen with my verizon account. Lots of automated mail-undeliverable from postmasters etc. But when you examined the message code, it was clear from the routing information that *my* account was not the account from which the message originated.

I called my counselor at the psychic friends network and she cleared up the problem for me for only US$2.98 a minute, and helped me understand why chicks go psycho on me after only three dates. But that's another story. Would you like to hear it? Just concentrate really hard and you can read it. My psychic friend entered it into the eternal akashic record; it hangs in the ether, like a zen calligraphy-banner.

[I still care]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/902643/posts

is an interesting article.

[Asclepius]

My biggest question about spammers is how do they make any money? If they go to such trouble to hide their tracks, how do they receive the payment from the handful of suckers who actually do want to have a LARGER P*N*S?

The most obnoxious, most successful spammers are independent contractors. You contract with a spammer to deliversy so many messages to so many people, with your conctact information embedded in the message. Everything else is spoofed, as you put it.

[clamper1797]

Can spoofers compromise my secure sites (get my passwords)

[ken in texas]

Or an acquaintance of yours that has your email address is infected with the Klez virus.

It goes through their address book and picks one address to use as the sender (it happened to grab your address), and emails itself to other addresses it finds in the address book. People receiving the message think it's from you, and error notifications come back to you, even though you didn't send them.

[Asclepius]

Can spoofers compromise my secure sites (get my passwords)

Dude. They're just spoofing your email address to give them cover etc. When they use a "real" email address, like, say, yours, they are less likely to get filtered by firewalls and antispam software etc. So, no.

[Alouette]

Can spoofers compromise my secure sites (get my passwords)

A trojan (backdoor virus) can scan your "cookies" directory for usernames to secure sites. Passwords are encrypted and can (or should be) only be decrypted by the server on the secure site.

[clamper1797]

I found CMEII running on my system ... how do I get rid of it ????

[Smokin' Joe]

Something similar happened to me on an independant ISP. Three messages arrived about undeliverable mail, all with spam attached, all allegedly sent from my address. Virus checks came up negative, FixKlez didn't find anything, Pest Patrol found some adware which was deleted.

It hasn't happened since.

I suppose there might be some way to set an e-mail address as sender, fire the spam out to non-working address(es) and let the system mail the message 'back' to you. Virtually everyone opens messages which say a message did not go through, so more people would see/read the spam.

If so, (that this is just a new way of sending spam), this is diabolically clever, but it p!ssed me off that I spent half a day purging my computers of a problem which wasn't (or did not appear to be) there.

[clamper1797]

I HATE !@#$%^&* Spammers

[Smokin' Joe]

To put it mildly, me too! Even with filters set at maximum, which means I end up digging out things like NRA/ILA alerts (marked as XXX!) I still have 3/4 crap.

If I had three inches for every three inches I'd been promised, I'd be a hit with the girls who hang out around Rodeos--for calf roping equipment.

I did show an ad to my wife, though, and her response was an emphatic NO!, so that made me feel good, but otherwise, I envision a small spot in Hell where these folks can read aloud every message they send .....

[spunkets]

CMEII is gator spyware, see, remove spyware toward the bottom.

It looks like someone's entered by that method and is grabbing passwords. Since your computer doesn't contain any e-mail virus(according to Norton), the spam is probably going from someone else's computer. See also

See if you have a program called "system32.exe" running, or residing on your computer.

[Alouette]

First, make sure you have Norton Internet Security installed on your machine. Configure so that it updates for viruses frequently (I have mine set up to update every 4 hours). Also schedule a complete virus scan once a week (mine rund every Friday night). Configure your virus scanner to DELETE every email that had a viral attachment. You might lose some email from people you know, but tough.

Download and install a spyware washer. The best one is Spybot Search & Destroy This wipes any "spyware" you might have installed if you have downloaded Kazaa, Gator, Vomit Cursor and other crap programs.

All that said, there is really no way that you can protect yourself from a spammer who spoofs your email. If you find out that your own email to others is getting bounced because you have been misidentified as a "spammer" notify your ISP ASAP because their server may be compromised.

[spunkets]

Review of spyware wipers