Hotmail worm?

[Kristoffer]

For some time now, my MSN email account has been sending junk/virus emails to people on my contact list. Note: I don't have a local email application, instead composing all my emails through hotmail.com. So, I immediately tried a scan with both Kasperky and Win Security Essentials, both came up negitive. I also deleted the contact list, but the junk emails continued to be sent to addresses in my inbox. Now, after managing to accidentally destroy the Windows bootloader, the ensuing reformat of my C:\ drive and a clean install of windows has not corrected the problem.

The only possibilities I can think of are: the problem is in a data file on my D:\ partition and a virus scanner won't find it; the problem is located on the Hotmail server (highly unlikely after this long of a time period); or I've managed to get another virus after reformatting the system drive.

Sorry I haven't been overly specific, but with no luck in an antivirus program, I don't know what details to report here. If any one has any experiance with this or a similar problem, I'm just out of ideas.

 

[mickey megabyte]

recently (over the weekend) emails were sent to everybody on my hotmail/live contacts list too, just containing a link to a web-page - naturally i didn't try clicking on it, neither did any of the recipients.

i'm sure that this is a microsoft security problem, not yours, as i do not have my live contacts stored on my pc. i also did full scans with kis2011 and malwarebytes, just to make sure - neither of them found a problem.

the only thing i can suggest is to change your hotmail/live/msn password frequently.

 

[Xhi]

This happened to me once. Actually, when I logged in, I got a message that my account has been temporarily suspended because apparently I was sending spam to people. When I was able to contact hotmail support thru my other email, they told me someone got into my account and started sending spam. Everything was resolved and they re-opened my account.

Ever since that event I always changed my hotmail password once a month.

 

[Corrine]

Hi, Kristoffer.

Your Hotmail account has been compromised. See my instructions on Hotmail Security to Protect and Recover Your Account.