Help, my email account has been hacked

Bogof_Babe

My Hotmail (Live) account has today been sending out spam messages (sort of viagra selling) to all my contacts. The second one has just gone out so it seems it will continue.

Is there anything I can do? I have Kaspersky which hasn't flagged anything up, although I did notice a couple of surprise pop-ups last week that I don't usually get. (Edit: lol no viagra pun intended!)

Will I have to close down that email address and open a new one?

davb

The first thing you need to do is change your Hotmail password, as it has most likely been compromised.

Mojisola

davb wrote: »

The first thing you need to do is change your Hotmail password, as it has most likely been compromised.

Before you change it, check your settings.

When my hotmail account was hacked, the hackers changed the setting so that they were informed whenever the password was changed. They fixed the notification email address so that I couldn't change it - it's greyed out on the screen and doesn't respond to being clicked on.

Bogof_Babe

Oh thanks, I'll do that right away.

Bogof_Babe

Mojisola wrote: »

Before you change it, check your settings.

When my hotmail account was hacked, the hackers changed the setting so that they were informed whenever the password was changed. They fixed the notification email address so that I couldn't change it - it's greyed out on the screen and doesn't respond to being clicked on.

Oops too late, just changed it. Off to see if I can work out what they've done to my settings...

Bogof_Babe

I don't understand. It seems to expect me to have a different email address so that they can verify the password change to it. I put in the address that has been hacked and it said it was too long or contained characters that aren't allowed.

Then I tried the mobile phone number option but it didn't like that either. Said it wasn't recognised with the country I'd selected (UK).

Don't know what to do now. Also I'm just about to log off as we're going away tomorrow so need an early night. Think it will have to wait until I get back.

Thanks for the suggestions so far. If anyone has any more ideas please keep them coming.

macman

Are the spam messages actually in your sent mail folder? If not, you haven't been hacked, it's just address spoofing, which you can do nothing about.

Mojisola

macman wrote: »

Are the spam messages actually in your sent mail folder? If not, you haven't been hacked, it's just address spoofing, which you can do nothing about.

With my account, everyone in my address list was sent emails - in my case selling designer handbags so not so embarrassing as it could have been. I've been able to stop that happening by clearing all the names from the address book. Now, if I start to send an email, the spam message is already on the screen and I have to delete it each time.

I'm now using a different email address - not hotmail - but I don't want to close it down as some people may still use it to contact me.

macman

Priority is to change the password then.
Kaspersky won't find anything, as Hotmail is a webmail system-the data is held on their servers, not on your PC.

Bogof_Babe

It's weird, I had several Postmaster "message not delivered" replies from people who didn't show in my Sent box. Only three of my contacts did show in my Sent box, but it obviously tried to send to lots more. It's a mystery.

Anyway I'm going offline until Sunday night now so if any more replies appear I'll thank them when I return!

macman

You must change your password a a priority-if not you'll find yourself locked out of the account when someone else does it for you.
It appears that your address is being spoofed as well.