Emails sent while computer turned off

zaksmum

I've just got home after a week away. My computer was turned off and unplugged. When I turned it on and checked my emails I had over 250 emails returned as undelivered, and another 120 returned due to something about bulk sending rules.

As far as I can see, most of them had no text, just characters, but some that did get through had links to such things as Viagra!!! My daughter had one of these from my email address.

The sent emails went to random email addresses from my email address book, and all were sent around 2am on the same date.

How could this possibly happen when I was away from home and my computer unplugged at home? I didn't access my emails from any other computer while away.

Can I make sure it doesn't happen again?

closed

Could be infected, scan with malwarebytes, or some spambot has got hold of your email address, in which case there is nothing you can do

zaksmum

closed wrote: »

Could be infected, scan with malwarebytes, or some spambot has got hold of your email address, in which case there is nothing you can do

How can I find out if that's the case then?

closed

which, infected? scan with malwarbytes, kaspersky etc, links in part 3

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/2436849

chunter

Is it a webmail account (hotmail, google, yahoo, etc) or a bespoke email (eg info@mydomain.com)?

macman

Even the cleverest spyware or trojan in the world can't switch your PC on if it's unlugged at the wall...
It's just address spoofing. A spambot has harvested your address book and is now sending spam purportedly from your address. But since most of the addresses it sends to are auto-generated and don't exist, they bounce back as undeliverable-to you. The rest were bounced by your ISP as you exceeded your 'send copies' limit.
Start by changing your email password to something much stronger to crack, and do a full scan with a decent on-demand scanner like MalwareBytes to see if anything shows up.
And if your AV prog is McCrapee, uninstall it and use a decent one instead: Avira, Avast and MSE are all free, Kaspersky is free with Barclays online banking.

zaksmum

chunter wrote: »

Is it a webmail account (hotmail, google, yahoo, etc) or a bespoke email (eg [EMAIL="info@mydomain.com"]info@mydomain.com[/EMAIL])?

I don't know what that means but it's an aol email account

zaksmum

macman wrote: »

Even the cleverest spyware or trojan in the world can't switch your PC on if it's unlugged at the wall...
It's just address spoofing. A spambot has harvested your address book and is now sending spam purportedly from your address. But since most of the addresses it sends to are auto-generated and don't exist, they bounce back as undeliverable-to you. The rest were bounced by your ISP as you exceeded your 'send copies' limit.
Start by changing your email password to something much stronger to crack, and do a full scan with a decent on-demand scanner like MalwareBytes to see if anything shows up.
And if your AV prog is McCrapee, uninstall it and use a decent one instead: Avira, Avast and MSE are all free, Kaspersky is free with Barclays online banking.

Thanks macman...this is all hard for me to understand though.

What does address spoofing mean? And what's a Spambot? The addresses sent to DID exist. I do have good security, I use Norton which I paid for. Do I need a better one?

balloo_2

zaksmum wrote: »

I use Norton which I paid for. Do I need a better one?

I am by far an expert only learning myself, but I have learned that because the ones that get most press like Norton or McAffee are not the best. There are other virus checkers out there free and better to, as macman said Avast, Avira, and MSE are all free, Kaspersky is free with Barclays online banking. but be careful if you are thinking of trying any free ones the same time as your Norton because that in some cases causes a conflict and slows your computer down. So if you have a disk for your Norton delete it and try one of the free ones.

http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Malwarebytes-AntiMalware/1186760019/1

Thats the link to download a good Malware checker just click on it.

closed

spam bot is a machine or group of machines (usually infected) that send out the spam emails.

spoofing means pretending to come from a legitimate persons email address, when in fact they can come from anywhere, just because they said from xxx@xxx.com, doesn't mean they did.