Hotmail account sending spam emails

Making It Bad

My hotmail account has been sending spam emails for the last few weeks or so. I've only realised this as I got 20 messages from 'postmaster@mail.hotmail.com' saying

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

Delivery to the following recipients failed.

......@hotmail.com





--Forwarded Message Attachment--
From: (my hotmail account)
To: .....@hotmail.com
Subject: RE：z
Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2010 01:05:08 +0000






.ExternalClass .ecxhmmessage P
{padding:0px;}
.ExternalClass body.ecxhmmessage
{font-size:10pt;font-family:Verdana;}




hi friend:
how are you today, i hope you are fine. there is a good site : .....com
it is very nice, they sell electronic items , price is very low, but quality is high, if you are interested please visit it . i think you will have a good shopping from them.

mail:oursaler@188.com
msn:oursaler@hotmail.com

So basically it's been sending emails to people not on my contacts list. I thought there might be a trojan on my pc so I scanned with Avira, Superantispyware and Malware Bytes all of which returned no results.

I then figured it must be because of this 'gadget' which I recently started using to link my hotmail account to my iGoogle homepage. So I got rid of the gadget and changed my password. I did this yesterday, however am still sending the spam as I got another message off 'postmaster@mail.hotmail.com' similar to above.

I have no idea how to stop it anymore. I don't think there is malware on my pc as I have other hotmail which I use and they are fine. Can anyone help?

wolfric

big edit: Delivery notification messages take time to come through. Your password change might be successfully thwarting the spam. Give it a day or two and see if it keeps coming. Otherwise see below:


Use a different pc to change password. Don't login for a while. Then log into the other pc.

I'd normally advise against using a public/school/friends pc but in your case i'd make the exception. If it's a locked down computer which doesn't look like it has a load of crap and is updated and patched then i'd chance it.

I'll have to test this theory out but: People can spoof emails easily to come from your account. That you can definitely do. I wonder though if it generates a delivery failure, should it come back to you.

Although this makes it a little complicated, if set up your gmail account to check your hotmail account and recieve emails (gmail->settings->accounts and import->Add pop3 email) you can open up an email and click the button on the right and "see original". As far as i know gmail is the only standard provider to offer this. This basically maps back where the email came from and what servers it went through to get to your mailbox. If it's not coming from yours and being spoofed, you should get some sort of idea from there. If you decide to go with this option, just paste the whole log in and i'll take a look.

CrackisWhack

This has happened to me and a few other people i know, from what i can figure out hotmail servers have been hacked as none of your contact info is stored on your computer(its on microsoft servers) from what i can gather microsoft are not admitting liability.

I ended up closing my account as i had some business contacts etc. on it:mad:

Making It Bad

CrackisWhack wrote: »

This has happened to me and a few other people i know, from what i can figure out hotmail servers have been hacked as none of your contact info is stored on your computer(its on microsoft servers) from what i can gather microsoft are not admitting liability.

I ended up closing my account as i had some business contacts etc. on it:mad:

Luckily the people which it's sending emails to are completely random and not on my contacts list at all.

wolfric

I doubt it... I really doubt it. If Microsoft servers are hacked you'll know about it. People are too quick to blame their account getting hacked. Your password was probably either stolen, guessed or your connection was piggy backed while you logged in by a spam program.

That's about as likely as someone breaking into your house and leaving the toilet seat up and hiding the keys and not taking anything.

Making It Bad

wolfric wrote: »

big edit: Delivery notification messages take time to come through. Your password change might be successfully thwarting the spam. Give it a day or two and see if it keeps coming. Otherwise see below:

You could be right about this. Normally i'd get 10 or so messages at once telling me the emails failed to deliver. Today, I got 2.

Making It Bad

Yes! They appeared to have stopped. Thanks for the help anyway.

CreepingDeath

Did you have any of those e-mails in your sent folder ?

If you do, then they hacked into your account.
If you don't, then they're probably e-mail spoofing.

E-mail spoofing is trivial to do, just like posting a letter but putting the "Return to" address as someone else's. They don't need access to your e-mail account, they just use it because it's easier than manually creating hundreds of hotmail accounts themselves.

Making It Bad

I just checked there and I did have one of the emails in my sent email box. So I guess they did hack my account then? Everything seems fine now anyway since the password change.