A friend of mine has had her hotmail account hacked. Some pan head is using her e-mail address to send out things like

‘I bought a new wallet from http//:my-dodgy-web-site.com why don’t you take a look at our range of jewelery…’

Apparently lots of other people she knows have received the same or similar…

She’s asking me if I know how to stop it ? ….but I don’t !

anyone.. ?

thanks,
Kev

My Mum’s just had the same problem. I changed her to Microsoft Security Essentials and got her to run Malwarebytes.

Free

Easy

Sorted.

Malwarebytes
M.S.E.

cheers… will send the details on… in a reply to the spam which I received 🙂

Change the password on the account.
Change the alternative email address on the account (since that can be used to change the password)
Change the ‘secret question’ on the account (ditto).

And make sure that if she uses the same email address and password for anything related to money (eg paypal, amazon, etc) that she changes those ASAP!)

Many people get caught by this without any kind of virus – they simply use the same email address and password for everything. Crooks just set up a site that you have to log into and when people create an account (email and pw!) they then try that on the relevant email website and then on paypal, etc…

Is her account definitely hacked ? If she logs on and looks in the “Sent Messages” (or whatever it’s called) folder in Hotmail then can she see all the SPAM messages being sent ? If she can’t then it’s unlikely her account has been hacked but instead her Email address is being used as the purported sender of the EMails. This is easy to do and is a common spammer trick. My work Email account was used for this yesterday.

Happened to me about a month ago. Do what clubber says above.

Stuff like Microsoft Security, Malaware Bites etc is completely irrelevant because it’s the only mailbox that’s been hacked – nothing whatever to do with the PC