Hoping this is in the right section...My father has a netbook running Windows 7 basic, and in the past few days his email contacts have been receiving spam from his address.I've run an antivirus (AVG free) and a couple of malware detectors (Spybot Search and Destroy and Malwarebytes) and everything came up clean.As a next step I'll change his email password and security question to see whether that makes any difference, but really I'm a bit out of my depth here - I haven't run Windows in years and when I did I never had security issues. Are there any other checks I should be doing?
It's trivial to change the "from" address on email so there's no guarantee that the spam is being sent from your father's computer. Changing the password is a good idea but it may not help in this case.
blairm: Hoping this is in the right section...My father has a netbook running Windows 7 basic, and in the past few days his email contacts have been receiving spam from his? address.I've run an antivirus (AVG free) and a couple of malware detectors (Spybot Search and Destroy and Malwarebytes) and everything came up clean.As a next step I'll change his email password and security question to see whether that makes any difference, but really I'm a bit out of my depth here - I haven't run Windows in years and when I did I never had security issues.?Are there any other checks I should be doing?
Blair
Whats the IP address it is getting sent from though? If you are using webmail, such as hotmail it could be hacked. Anyone can use anyones from email address to send emails. It may not have anything to do with their actual computer at all.
You re probably best to contact the email provider they use to send emails, to see if they know why it is happening.
Behodar: It's trivial to change the "from" address on email so there's no guarantee that the spam is being sent from your father's computer. Changing the password is a good idea but it may not help in this case.
So if it's not being sent from Dad's email, is there anything we can do to stop the spam?
Behodar: It's trivial to change the "from" address on email so there's no guarantee that the spam is being sent from your father's computer. Changing the password is a good idea but it may not help in this case.
So if it's not being sent from Dad's email, is there anything we can do to stop the spam?
You haven't provided enough details. Who the email account with is a good start. It is highly likely that their email account has been compromised, as it happens a lot, and if that is the case then there are things they can do.
Whats the IP address it is getting sent from though? If you are using webmail, such as hotmail it could be hacked. Anyone can use anyones from email address to send emails. It may not have anything to do with their actual computer at all.
You re probably best to contact the email provider they use to send emails, to see if they know why it is happening.
Originating address is in Hong Kong, contact email is a yahoo address. My father's email address is an xtra one. Contacted the Xtra - the person on the help desk seemed pretty uninterested.
Have told Dad not to use the netbook for a few days to see whether that makes a difference; and I'll put Linux Mint on it when I'm up there next weekend (it's his preference anyway) to see if that makes a difference too.
Whats the IP address it is getting sent from though? If you are using webmail, such as hotmail it could be hacked. Anyone can use anyones from email address to send emails. It may not have anything to do with their actual computer at all.
You re probably best to contact the email provider they use to send emails, to see if they know why it is happening.
Originating address is in Hong Kong, contact email is a yahoo address. My father's email address is an xtra one. Contacted the Xtra - the person on the help desk seemed pretty uninterested.
Have told Dad not to use the netbook for a few days to see whether that makes a difference; and I'll put Linux Mint on it when I'm up there next weekend (it's his preference anyway) to see if that makes a difference too.
Blair
Telecoms xtra email serive is just yahoo. It sounds like their email account could have been hacked. Change the password on that. If you look in the 'sent emails in the xtra/yahoo webmail can you see any sent emails? I doubt windows has anything to do with the problem, hacked email accounts are independent of that, and can happen with any os.
Behodar: It's trivial to change the "from" address on email so there's no guarantee that the spam is being sent from your father's computer. Changing the password is a good idea but it may not help in this case.
So if it's not being sent from Dad's email, is there anything we can do to stop the spam?
It's trivial to fake/spoof the from address of an email and there's nothing you can do about it.
If they are using an @xtra.co.nz account you should also log into the webmail and check to see if a "Holiday" response has been set up. This means that whenever someone emails your father's account they automatically receive an email from that account.
If that has been set up, then I would definitely give Telecom another call to check for other settings that might have been changed.
Thanks to all for the help.I've changed the password and security question on my parents' email account and haven't received any spam from them since. Here's hoping it works.After a it of research I agree it probably isn't a Windows issues and may well have happened under Linux, but Dad's adamant he wants to use Linux on his netbook anyway (my parents have been using Ubuntu or Open Suse on their desktop for years and love it) so I'll make the change anyway. Cheers,
I have had a couple of these on clients computers,
log onto the xtra webmail.
double check the fowarding option make sure its not forwarding the emails else where. what they normally do is take the first part of your email then make a yahoo.co.nz and forward it to there eg it would forward it to yourlogin@yahoo.co.nz
also make sure they havent changed the option where the sent mail is put in sent folder normally they will change this so if you send email from webmail it does not show in the sent box.
Hu? did i do that? 16Mb (EDO RAM), K6-II processor, 2Mb of onboard graphics. 32k dial up modem. 12 speed CD ROM. 5¼-inch floppy drive. 500Mb HDD.
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