Help Me

[art_collector]

Hi,

Have been facing a problem wth my hotmail account lately.All my contacts recieve an email from me advertising sale of some medication..it has a link attached. I have ofcourse not been sending the mails. Any idea whats wrong, Is it some Virus? and how can I stop it from happening again. Do I need to change my email account.Look forward to hearing from you. I use Trend Anti Virus progaram.

AC

[goodboy_mentor]

There are many possible reasons. Before I go into possible reasons, let me tell you that anyone can spoof an email id so that the email appears to be coming from some other email id. Hence there is practically not much you can do to prevent an email id spoofer from spoofing your email id and spamming around. Any of the following might have happened in your case:
1) Your computer is/was compromised by virus/spyware/hacking and your email id and address book were stolen. Email is either being generated from your computer by virus/spyware or the spammer is sitting somewhere and sending spoofed emails to your contacts in address book.
2) Possibly the Hotmail's database was comprised at some point of time and spammer is sending out emails.
3) You mentioned your email openly on some online forum or subscribed to some website from where your email address got leaked to spammers. Spammers can also get emails from bank databases, records of employers etc.
I am also facing this kind of problem where I am receiving emails that appear to from one of my email account that is very old. Possibly the email id has somehow landed with spammers. Practically I ignore such emails and never respond to them. They now land in my Spam folder. There is a way to identify if email has been sent from genuine email address or spoofed from domainkeys.
In my opinion, you cannot do much about points 2) and 3) except ignoring them and being careful in providing your email address to anyone unknown. For the problem mentioned in point 1) you can update your anti virus and anti spyware program and run a full scan to ensure that your computer is completely virus/spyware free. I do not see any need to change the email account. As a security precaution, you may change the password of your email account.

[art_collector]

Hi,

Did run a full system scan...report says:

CRITICAL MS04-028 Buffer overun in JPEG Processing (GDT+) could allow code execution 833987.
When we try to down Microsoft updates...it dosent do ...reads windows SP3 could not be down loaded.I use an original Windows XP. Any suggestions?

AC

[goodboy_mentor]

CRITICAL MS04-028 Buffer overun in JPEG Processing (GDT+) could allow code execution 833987

It means that memory buffer overrun vulnerability exists in the processing of JPEG image formats that could allow remote code execution on the affected system. Any program(like Internet Explorer) that processes JPEG images on the affected systems could be vulnerable to this attack, and any system that uses the affected programs or components could be vulnerable to this attack. An attacker(virus/worm/hacker) who successfully exploits this vulnerability could remotely take complete control of your operating system.

If your updates are not working then you may go to "Start" then to "Run" box and type "Services.msc", click OK, and find out if "Automatic Updates" service is running, if not then start that service. After this service is running, you should be able to download the updates unless there is some other problem that is preventing the updates from taking place.

If you want to know the detailed information about the error message and instructions by Microsoft you may refer: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/securi ... 4-028.mspx