Email Virus

Hi,

Last night I got a call from a friend to say he'd received a spam email from me. This consisted of a quote from JFK and a link to a cycling website. Needless to say, I did not send this email, and I have no record of it in my sent mail folder.

My email account is with Hotmail. I did get 15 or so 'undeliverable' messages for similar emails that were sent to old contacts of mine. Someone or something is sending these spam emails to people who were on my Hotmail contact list back in the days when I accessed Hotmail via the website. For 10 years or more I have been accessing Hotmail via a mail client.

Does anyone know what is happening here? I have scanned my Mac with Sophos, which identified a single threat and cleaned it up. However, I'm not sure whether the problem lies with my Mac or some other computer that I have used, at some time, to access Hotmail via the web. In particular I am worried about an old PC of mine that I finally threw out last week. Could someone have taken a battered old PC from the rubbish tip and gone through the hard drive looking for passwords, etc.?

I'd be grateful for any advice.

Richy

First thing to do is change your Hotmail password. If someone has hacked into your hotmail account online you won't see anything on your computer. Make sure the new password is strong. Interesting with Hotmail, had a friend with a similar experience a month or two ago, seems to be serious efforts to hack into Hotmail accounts.
(If your old computer had all your passwords and they were not protected i.e. in an encrypted format) then would be wise to change them).

Probably best to cancel that account and create a new one. A spam robot is likely using your account to send out email. Always use a strong password consisting of characters, upper and lower case letters and numbers.