Geek help please: address book hijacked

[brewerpaul]

Many of my friends have been getting mail, supposedly from me, telling them about a terrific website that a friend told me about, yadda yadda, with a link to the site.
I did not send these, so someone has hijacked my address book for nefarious purposes.
I have Avast Antivirus and Ad Aware running continuously and I routinely do complete scans with these which always come up clean.
How can I fix/stop this? I'd rather not change my email account, as Busman Whistles is linked to this address. Thanks.

[emmline]

I know little about this specific problem, other than it's caused by a rogue worm type thing, but I have liked Kaspersky on the PC (used by the resident anime fan.) It has done yeoman duty in keeping the creepazoids at bay.

[fearfaoin]

What are you using for email?
If you're using some web-based
AOL system, then it's probably on
their end and would have nothing
to do with your PC's security. You'd
have to talk to AOL if that's the case.

[brewerpaul]

What are you using for email?
If you're using some web-based
AOL system, then it's probably on
their end and would have nothing
to do with your PC's security. You'd
have to talk to AOL if that's the case.

I'm using Firefox to access AOL online. Guess it might be time to get a new email address with someone else. Any suggestions? Hotmail?Gmail?

[emmline]

What about using an email program to download and provide it's own filter and protections? Such as Thunderbird (a Mozilla/Firefox thing.)

[Jayhawk]

FWIW, I use Gmail and have had no problems.

[caedmon]

It may not be YOU that was hacked, but someone else's address book that contained YOUR e-mail address.

[fearfaoin]

I would certainly talk to AOL about it
even if you do decide to change. They
may want to know if something's going
down with their mail servers.

[fearfaoin]

What about using an email program to download and provide it's own filter and protections? Such as Thunderbird (a Mozilla/Firefox thing.)

Could be nice.
http://email.about.com/od/aoltips/qt/Ac ... rogram.htm

Though, it doesn't help if the perp
got the address book via AOL's servers.

If you're planning on changing, might
I suggest an email forwarding service.
My friend's been using pobox.com for
years. He has changed email providers
several times, but his email address
remains pobox.com, and the service
forwards all mail going to that address
to whatever his new email is.

[raindog1970]

Same thing happened to my Hotmail address book a couple of months ago.
Something was actually using my Hotmail account to send Spam e-mails to everyone in my address book, and not just doing the common trick of spoofing my address to send e-mails to random recipients.
I never did find any type of infection on my PC, but I restored my clean backup image and changed my e-mail password just to play it safe.
So far that has done the trick, and there has been no more suspicious activity on my Hotmail account.

[Pammy]

If you're planning on changing, might
I suggest an email forwarding service.
My friend's been using pobox.com for
years. He has changed email providers
several times, but his email address
remains pobox.com, and the service
forwards all mail going to that address
to whatever his new email is.

you can't have an email like poobox, every one would send you s***

[Lambchop]

If you're planning on changing, might
I suggest an email forwarding service.
My friend's been using pobox.com for
years. He has changed email providers
several times, but his email address
remains pobox.com, and the service
forwards all mail going to that address
to whatever his new email is.

you can't have an email like poobox, every one would send you s***

And people say you folks have no sense of humor!

[brewerpaul]

I don't have poobox, but I get all kinds of sh*t anyway...
Ran an in depth scan of my computer yesterday in safe mode and came up clean. I took the simple precaution of changing my AOL password, so maybe that will help.
Other email clients like Thunderbird would just access my AOL email, so I don't think that would be much use.

[Dale]

I think there's a new surge of these things. I got the emails from Paul's address and a similar message from three or four other email addresses of friends of mine. All the last 2 or 3 weeks.

[s1m0n]

At this stage of the our culture's adaptation to the net, this kinda thing is worth not much more than a shrug and 'these things happen'. If your friends don't know how to tell the real you from a man-size simulacrum sculpted out of canned spiced ham, they've got bigger and more urgent problems than seeing your name on an email header.