HELP! Hijacked Hotmail

[gordonware]

Couple weeks ago my wife's hotmail account sent out a couple of unauthorized emails using her contacts list from her Vista laptop. Did a scan with Microsoft Security Essentials which was on that machine and it found nothing.

Thought I could kill two birds by going ahead and doing a full clean install of Win 7, thereby getting her a new O/S and getting rid of the spybot or whatever it was causing the issue.

Well everything on the new O/S is fine for a couple of days then bingo today it sends out another unauthorized email to most of her contacts. Grrr.

Would my best course of action be to install and run Ad-aware and or Spybot, and/or someting else, and hope? Or do you have other suggestions to fix this problem. I am open to any and all courses of action as she really wants this fixed ASAP.

Want to add I've successfully installed Win 7 on 3 machines, and this website has been a real help to getting those installs accomplished. Thanks!

 

[ickymay]

try malwarebytes It's found and cured some tricky malware for me

 

[zigzag3143]

Couple weeks ago my wife's hotmail account sent out a couple of unauthorized emails using her contacts list from her Vista laptop. Did a scan with Microsoft Security Essentials which was on that machine and it found nothing.

Thought I could kill two birds by going ahead and doing a full clean install of Win 7, thereby getting her a new O/S and getting rid of the spybot or whatever it was causing the issue.

Well everything on the new O/S is fine for a couple of days then bingo today it sends out another unauthorized email to most of her contacts. Grrr.

Would my best course of action be to install and run Ad-aware and or Spybot, and/or someting else, and hope? Or do you have other suggestions to fix this problem. I am open to any and all courses of action as she really wants this fixed ASAP.

Want to add I've successfully installed Win 7 on 3 machines, and this website has been a real help to getting those installs accomplished. Thanks!

Hi and welcome

Question how do you know its the computer and not her account on hotmail?

Ken J

 

[TheSchaft]

Couple weeks ago my wife's hotmail account sent out a couple of unauthorized emails using her contacts list from her Vista laptop. Did a scan with Microsoft Security Essentials which was on that machine and it found nothing.

Thought I could kill two birds by going ahead and doing a full clean install of Win 7, thereby getting her a new O/S and getting rid of the spybot or whatever it was causing the issue.

Well everything on the new O/S is fine for a couple of days then bingo today it sends out another unauthorized email to most of her contacts. Grrr.

Would my best course of action be to install and run Ad-aware and or Spybot, and/or someting else, and hope? Or do you have other suggestions to fix this problem. I am open to any and all courses of action as she really wants this fixed ASAP.

Want to add I've successfully installed Win 7 on 3 machines, and this website has been a real help to getting those installs accomplished. Thanks!

Sounds like there's a problem with her account. A trojan cannot survive a clean install, so whatever it is came back in from the account.

Try MALWAREbytes and IObit 360 scans and tools to see if you can find and nuke whatever it is.

If it isn't too much of a problem, delete the account and get a new one. (That ought to thrill her. )

 

[Airbot]

Well if it is a web based email like hotmail, it's probably not any malware on the system, rather someone may have hacked into her hotmail account, or got a hold of the password/username. Best thing to do would be to change her password, and make it a strong alphanumeric one.