Hotmail concerns

Si-Co · Mon 16 May, 2005 20.50

Has anyone had any strange 'failed delivery' messages in their Hotmail inbox before?

When I logged in this evening there were three messages waiting for me, all being 'failed delivery' reports to addresses I did not recognise.

I don't use my Hotmail for sending emails - only for MSN Messenger - and no-one knows my password (it's not even one a mate could guess easily).

I'm a little concerned (also because I had some minor difficulties logging on to AOL, my ISP, this evening). Should I be worried?

Here's a quick cut and paste of one of the emails:

From : System Administrator <[email protected]>
Sent : 16 May 2005 16:09:35
To : [email protected]
Subject : Undeliverable: Turkish Tabloid Enrages Germany with Nazi Comparisons

Your message

To: [email protected]
Subject: Turkish Tabloid Enrages Germany with Nazi Comparisons
Sent: Mon, 16 May 2005 10:55:44 -0500

did not reach the following recipient(s):

[email protected] on Mon, 16 May 2005 11:09:22
-0500
The recipient name is not recognized
The MTS-ID of the original message is: c=us;a= ;p=dfw airport
boar;l=EXCHANGE50505161609JWRPG9RR
MSEXCH:IMS:DFW Airport Board:DFW:EXCHANGE5 0 (000C05A6) Unknown
Recipient
[email protected] on Mon, 16 May 2005 11:09:22
-0500

Any advice would be appreciated.

Orry Verducci · Mon 16 May, 2005 21.05

That is very suspicious. It is obviously not ment to be there.

Ant · Mon 16 May, 2005 21.06

I got one of these before and it turned out that my PC was sending out e-mails because of a virus on my PC.

Off-topic a bit, but is it just me or is the sign in box changing from the old one to the new look Microsoft Passport Network box all the time?

Si-Co · Mon 16 May, 2005 21.07

Antz wrote:I got one of these before and it turned out that my PC was sending out e-mails because of a virus on my PC.

Eek - I'm off to do a scan!

Gavin Scott · Mon 16 May, 2005 21.09

E-mail worm throws up hate spam

A nasty side-effect for machines infected by the recent computer worm Sober-P has been revealed.
The worm has opened up a backdoor for a spam engine which has been downloading hate messages to all infected machines.

The inboxes of affected PCs have been filling with messages linked to right-wing German websites.

Sober-P grabbed attention at the beginning of the month, in Germany and around the world. The German version offered tickets to the 2006 World Cup.

Political spam

Now it has revealed a darker side and since Saturday has been downloading a spam engine - dubbed Sober-Q - which has bulk e-mailed links to right-wing German websites to all the PCs originally infected by Sober-P.

Politically motivated spam is a relatively recent development with the majority of junk e-mail aimed at emptying wallets with offers of porn, health cures and financial assistance.

The fact that the spam engine was kicked into effect by an earlier worm shows a "long-term desire" on the part of the author, and one that has been successful.

Security firm Clearswift said it was seeing as many as ten right-wing spam messages every minute.

"The original worm was obviously very successful and the volume of spam is huge," added Clearswift's threat lab manager, Pete Simpson.

Dr Lobster* · Mon 16 May, 2005 21.11

somehow your email address is being used by somebody, or something else. i know there are some viruses which trawl the local hard disk of users for email addresses and use these to send spams etc.

what may of happend, is that one of your friends has a virus on their machine and your email addresses has been harvested and used to send copies of the virus to other people. my email address was used this way - i tracked down who had the virus and emailed them about it, and the problem went away.

i wouldn't worry too much - i very much doubt it is somebody trying to discredit you.

Jamez · Mon 16 May, 2005 21.16

Dr Lobster wrote some random stuff about email... wrote:

Christ. Your avatar freaked me out!

Si-Co · Mon 16 May, 2005 21.27

Thanks to both Gavin and Dr L for the advice. Other than running a virus check and removing anything untoward, there's nothing else I really need to do is there?

Dr Lobster* · Mon 16 May, 2005 21.33

Si-Co wrote:Thanks to both Gavin and Dr L for the advice. Other than running a virus check and removing anything untoward, there's nothing else I really need to do is there?

if you've already got up-to-date antivirus software, and you've done a full system scan and drawn a blank you've done everything you can - chances are the mails are being sent from somebody elses computer.

have a look in the headers and see if you can identify the isp which the mails were sent from - you may be able to narrow down which one of your friends it came from.

good luck!

Dr Lobster* · Mon 16 May, 2005 21.34

Jamez wrote:
Dr Lobster wrote some random stuff about email... wrote:

Christ. Your avatar freaked me out!

hehe, it's my glands i tell you!

Gavin Scott · Mon 16 May, 2005 21.36

Si-Co wrote:Thanks to both Gavin and Dr L for the advice. Other than running a virus check and removing anything untoward, there's nothing else I really need to do is there?

Don't know. The BBC online story will probably have useful links to advice pages.

I got three of them yesterday, though oddly I didn't think anything of it until you mentioned it. I'd read the story on the BBC and hadn't put two and two together. Well done you. And me, eventually.

The cherry on the cake is that my Macafee software (trial) lapsed about a fornight ago and now displays an angry looking black icon in the system tray instead of the usual cheerful red one.

Add to that the rather freaky female robot voice which startled me yesterday announcing *Warning! Virus!* when I was file swapping on MSN and I think its safe to say I'm buggered too.