Hey, Leo. I have new issue: every Tuesday, Hotmail sends out the same
message to about six of my contacts automatically. How do I stop this? These
contacts must think I’m an idiot.
In this excerpt from
Answercast #11, I become suspicious about activity coming out of a Hotmail
account and look at ways to protect your account.
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Unwanted emails to your contacts?
No, they probably don’t think you’re an idiot. They probably think as I do
that your email account has been probably been hacked.
What I would recommend you do immediately is change your password and change
everything that could be used for a password recovery associated with your
Hotmail account.
Changing your security information
I actually have an article on that called “Is changing my
password enough?“
The short answer there is “No.”
Compromised computer
The only other thing that comes to mind (since this is a Hotmail account,
it’s not as likely) is perhaps if you’re accessing Hotmail via an email
program, rather than the web; there’s some form of malware on your PC or some
kind of problem with the email program that you’re using.
Fundamentally, this still feels like a hacked email account and that’s the
approach I would suggest you take.
If it continues after securing your account further, then I would start to
look into other ways that your email account is being accessed: if you are
indeed using a PC-based email program.
My wife’s email hotmail/live got hacked a recently. A nasty thing called Backdoor:PHP/C99 a Trojan virus.
It took over her live mail account and sent out spam emails to everybody. I downloaded MS Standalone Sweeper on another computer to disk and ran it on her comput. Took almost five hours but it did find and get rid of the bug. I loaded Bitdefender Internet Security on her comput as she had been using Mcafee which didn’t catch the bug. It tried to get back in but Bitdefender caught it. It did a lot of nasty things while in the comput. Files went missing and others got moved around. Some programs got loaded on that shouldn’t have been there. Whomever took control also hacked our wireless modem and messed with it as well. It took three to four days to get rid of it totally.