Page 1 of Spam email - How do they do that?

Somehow an email has been sent from me to all my contacts recommending some electric goods site and they`ll get special discounts yada yada...

Email sent complete with my signature which is my name and link to my site.
Looks proper. Could be worse in that it could have been porn or sales of over-65 jizz mags.
HTF do they do that?? Should I be closing that email addy down asap?

This item was edited on Thursday, 5th March 2009, 11:33

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoofing_attack

Whilst it could be a spoof it sounds more like a hacked account.

There have been quite a few of these attacks recently - mostly accounts with weak passwords being hacked. A friend of ours had it done to them, an e-mail from their account came from somewhere in Queensland, even though they`ve never been there.

Time to change password to a stronger one if this is what`s happened.

Could be a virus/trojan as well I guess. Try running a scan.

I say blow up your computer then the Internet and start from scratch, should solve it.

Sod it. Hotmail account closed. No one would ever have guessed my password anyway as its a made up fijiany-type word, and I only check it at home.
Somehow I feel liberated and at peace..........until I open a new one up in a mo.

That gmail looks ok.

If no-one *really* could have guessed your account password, then there are only two other options:

1) Hotmail itself got hacked
2) A computer you use to login to Hotmail has been compromised

Whilst it could be the first option, you really really really want to make sure it isn`t the second. What anti-virus software do you run? How up to date do you keep the definitions?


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I`m the only one who uses this pc and this is the only pc i check personal stuff on. I am 100% sure of that. Not a chance of the password being guessed as it wasnt a proper word and had numerical digits in their for good measure. I have FF`s Webmail Notifier add-on if that makes a difference.

Avast is on auto-update and scans my sh*t and i do full checks once a week.
So if its one of those two then it could only be the 1st.

Very puzzling why someone would hack hotmail just to advertise their company.

was it from
www.vvcnr.com
?

just wondering `cos I`ve just had an email from some-one I haven`t heard from in litteraly years, and it was sent from their hotmail account

googling that address it looks like lots of people have had their mail accounts used/spoofed to make it look like they sent the email.