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bonus's avatar

My mom's Hotmail address book has been hacked. What should she do now?

Asked by bonus (531points) | asked June 8th, 2009 | 4 responses | “Great Question” (0points) | Flag as…

Over the past 3 weeks, apparently, my mom has sent about 4 mass emails to everyone in her email address book at Hotmail. Essentially spam from a company called Ebestcargo.com, this email has either infected her address book or the address book of others, including a Yahoo group. All the emails sent from her have only said her email address in the from line. We changed her passwords on hotmail + facebook…

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The_Compassionate_Heretic's avatar

#1 Change password immediately.
#2 Update malware protection

If someone is spoofing her email address, there’s no defense against that.

The_Compassionate_Heretic (13700points)“Great Answer” (0points) Flag as…
bonus's avatar

Done + Done. Her malware protection is pretty sucky, though (Mcaffee).

bonus (531points)“Great Answer” (0points) Flag as…
The_Compassionate_Heretic's avatar

Sounds like that email address might be being spoofed.
You might want to check the “sent items” from her hotmail acct. to verify.

MacAfee is usually pretty effective against a lot of malware and viruses but you may want to try something like AVG to verify. Redundancy is a good thing but if you load AVG on her PC, make sure to disable MacAfee first. Dual virus scanners will often cause problems if running simultaneously.

Best of luck.

The_Compassionate_Heretic (13700points)“Great Answer” (0points) Flag as…

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