Someone sent email from my hotmail account

Emma79

It seems as though my husbands hotmail account has been accessed by someone as he has sent an email to all of his address book on "Super experience of shopping!" with a link to their website.

We have just moved to Sky and have McAfee installed on our PC. Seems to be fully installed, although last week the software did request (via a cross in the McAfee icon in the system tray) that we verify our account.

He does not use the account anywhere exept from home.

Does anyone recognise this scam and should we be worried about hte security of our computer?
Thanks,
Emma

choccyface

the same thing happened to me last weekend. it happened after my computer got a virus which alienrik on here kindly sorted. The advice i was given re my hotmaill was to change my password to a long one with numbers and letters, capitals and lower case on a different computer. Then run malwarebytes to see if anything nasty on there. check your address book too - mine got deleted. Its been over a week now and nothing else has happened so hoping it was a one off.

to confirm, change your password on a different computer, then run a full scan. post the log on here and i'm sure a nice teckie person will check it for you. i'm clueless with them or i'd help you!!

Emma79

Thanks Choccyface - will do so now. Does anyone know if the McAfee scan will do the same job malwarebytes?

Thanks.

macman

Emma79 wrote: »

Thanks Choccyface - will do so now. Does anyone know if the McAfee scan will do the same job malwarebytes?

Thanks.

No, McAfee is rubbish, use MalwareBytes which is far better.

wakers23

To be honest i would not recommend Mcafee to anyone, its not very good. It's likely you have a keylogger virus. You can change the password on your hotmail account on the same pc you are using by using the virtual keyboard program, so it can not recognise your keyboard input. I would highly recommend changing from Mcafee as the detection rates are not that great. I would suggest Kaspersky, it has a higher virus detection rate, uses lower system resources, and can be brought quite cheaply.

duchy

I had this problem a few weeks ago too. Electrical goods site it was
Changed my PW and have had no futher problems.
The advice I was given is that they gather email addresses (or randomly generate them) and run a program with random passwords until some hit lucky-hence the need for non obvious passwords.
MacAfee is OK as security systems go and as you've just moved to Sky you presumably have a year of free protection anyway so in your situation (which I am) I'd just stick with what you have for now unless anything else happens. It doesn't appear to be a particually sophisticated attack-mine was definitely a hack into my hotmail account rather than a virus. Yours sounds the same.