Spam being sent from hotmail to contact list

FiddlersElbowfi

Okay, not sure exactly if this is the right place for this but was as close as could find.
Basically my girlfriend's email account seems to have been hacked. A few months ago, her email address sent spam, selling some form of dodgy goods, to a number (I think it was 50) of the people on her contact list. Now it's happened again, though this time it's been sent to everyone far as I can make out. It's coming up as an ebay message in the subject section. She did get an awconfim@ebay message (a well-known spoof email) a while back but I honestly dont know whether she clicked a link or gave them any info. Is she just better off changing her email address or would a password change do the trick? Will this spam being sent carry on if she does nothing? Its a bit embarrassing for her obviously as its going to work/ business emails, etc.
On a slightly separate note, I just noticed an email in her account from paypal saying that some security questions on her account have been changed in the last few days, which she didnt do. Now is this genuine or is it a dodgy link do people think? Ive sent the email on to paypal but what would people's ideas be? Is her paypal account in trouble now as well? The problem is she's out of the country for a few days so I dont have her account details to check everything.
Would appreciate any help/ suggestions or anything from people who've had similar problems.
Cheers.

smellyanus

The exact same thing happened to my girlfriend.
A couple of months ago spam was sent from her account to the first half of her contacts list, and last week the same thing happened again to her whole contact list. It is probably a safe assumption to make that the same person is doing this. I looked into the last time it happened (didnt bother this time cos i got her to change her e-mail password) and it is a chinese fella. He sets up bogus sites offering cheap electronics, the one a few months ago was called gelishi.com.

As no one else answered the best advice I can give you is to get her to change her mail password and make sure to use a mixture of caps, non caps, numbers and symbols. A basic password using just letters can be cracked fairly easily by someone who knows what they are doing.
My birds paypal account looks ok but to be safe she changed the password on that too.
We forwrded the spam to paypal and they either weren't arsed or just didn't read it properly and replied saying that her mail address could have been gotten from a source other than ebay, they seemed to be under the impression that she had received spam rather than her account being hacked.

Bogger77

More importantly, use a machine you can be sure is clean for changing the passwords etc.