Hotmail account hijacked by spammer: advice needed

[FridgeMagnet]

It is a pain changing email addresses, but it becomes even more of a pain the longer you leave it. It's a tactic that's deliberately used by companies so that you _don't_ move. Sometimes you just have to email everyone repeatedly to say "please do not send mail to this address".

What you want to do is make sure that you are using an address that allows automatic forwarding. Gmail does for instance - I used to use it all the time, but now I just have that address set to send mail to my proper account. Which is useful because people don't update your addresses, they're awful at it. I still have people sending mail to my Yahoo account which I've not used for about five years. (I assume - I've not logged in for ages - but they still were last time I looked.)

The best thing is to register a domain name, costing a few quid a year, and just set that to forward any mail it receives to your real address, so if people send things to [email protected] it ends up in whatever inbox you choose.

You don't want to have a business with a hotmail address anyway, it looks unprofessional.

 

[jæd]

The reply-to setting in my Hotmail account was changed. Emails were then sent in reply to every email in my inbox (many hundreds). The email sent was as posted above. This seems to have been done by a programme, rather than manually. (I'm going by the number of mails sent in the period of time.)

Since it wasn't me who did these things, it was hacking, wasn't it?

Was the Hotmail account setting changed, or was it just forged by the spammer. Its *very* easy to change the "From" and "Reply To" headers of emails. You can do it yourself in any email client.

Its very, very likely it was the this rather than someone hacking your account, but as I said, have you looked at the email headers...?

What is joe-job spamming?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job , it may be just be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter#Backscatter_of_email_spam

 

[jæd]

But it's also worth pointing out that loads of people may have your email address if you've had it a long time and you don't know who all of them are.

Setup forwarding from your old email address to the new one, and only send out email from the new one. (What has this got to do with spamming...? )

 

[JHE]

Was the Hotmail account setting changed, or was it just forged by the spammer. Its *very* easy to change the "From" and "Reply To" headers of emails. You can do it yourself in any email client.

Its very, very likely it was the this rather than someone hacking your account, but as I said, have you looked at the email headers...?



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job , it may be just be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter#Backscatter_of_email_spam

The 'reply-to' setting was changed. 'Replies' were sent to all the emails in my inbox. Those replies are in my sent box.

I'll have to read up on the other stuff, but that won't be tonight. In the meantime, I don't understand what you are saying.

 

[boskysquelch]

You have very clearly misunderstood the post to which you refer.

d'oh...oh I understand now.

 

[Boris Sprinkler]

The 'reply-to' setting was changed. 'Replies' were sent to all the emails in my inbox. Those replies are in my sent box.

I'll have to read up on the other stuff, but that won't be tonight. In the meantime, I don't understand what you are saying.

Ok, so ignoring some of the threadjacking that has occured above you need to get this sorted.

Now normally I would agree with Jæd and say that it was most likely spoofed by the spammer. However, the fact that the conditons above are described by yourself says to me it's not a simple spoofed spam email.

More likely some automated Trojan as I have described earlier that has either used a keylogger of some description to gain the password to your account and send spam from it or has attached itself to your messenger client in order to do the same.

I wouldn't say it was targetted (ie. a hacker sitting trying to guess your password) but is most likely automated attack and there are several trojans/worms currently doing the rounds that do this.

You need to ascertain where you picked up this particular piece of malware and therefore which host machine it is currently sitting on and also you need to ask yourself the followign questions.
Where do you use computers?
Where have you used MSN?
Where have you logged into hotmail from?
Do any of the computers you use have issues with spyware?
What was the email you send to everyone - copy and paste it below - remove your email addy and that of your friends - but then it can be identified to a particular piece of malware and accordingly removal instructions can be given...