Norton Internet Security / Norton AntiVirus

[IceFoxx]

Hello. For some time now my Outlook Express email address appears to have been hijacked. My daily amount of spam is astronomical and a lot of it appears to be coming from my own address. I do not know whats happening nor how to prevent and put and end to it.

I have the Norton Antivirus and Norton Antispam programs installed which I update regularly. Neither of these have ever indicated that theres been anything wrong at any time.

These rogue emails purporting to be from my own email address are ruining my life. My address is now on blacklists across the world it appears. Its so bad that I am unable to get emails through to friends or family.

My ISP, after a lot of pressing, alerted me to the fact that they think that I have some kind of Malware on my computer.

I need to know how to put an end to all of this and get my address off all these blacklists. Its ruining my life.

Please can anyone help me ?

Regards,

IceFoxx

[edit: changed font color to make text more legible.]

Message Edited by Tony_Weiss on 09-24-2008 06:53 PM

[mijcar]

Icefoxx,

I doubt that your email address has been hijacked.  What is probably happening is that it is being counterfeited.  It is not difficult for most people to fake a return address (but for the few who don't know, I'm not going to spell it out).  It is typical of spammers to use false headers to hide (from users like you) the real author of the email.  If you open up the header list, you can probably track down the real writer.

As for what you can do, there isn't much.  Most of the culprits reside in countries that do not respect other countries laws or national treaties in terms of misusing the internet.

One of the solutions is full disclosure on email address tracking, but there is a large contingent of people against that, some for reasonable reasons and others just to preserve their right to be pita.

[Floating_Red]

01. Upgrade to N.I.S. 2009.

02. Run LiveUpdate.

03. Re-start in to Safe Mode.

04. Do a Full System Scan.  Let us know the Results of this.

05. Change your e-mail address would be a good idea, if possible.

Please also provide your O.S., S.P. and what Version of N.AV. you use.

[IceFoxx · Accepted solution]

Hello again,

Thanks for the information. At least I can rest easy now in the knowledge that my PC doesn't have malware sitting in its system (its Windows XP Home). I have always kept my Security subscription paid-for and updated regularly. I will however upgrade as soon as I get the opportunity to do it. I'll follow the 5 steps you took me through, thanks very much. My ISP is Orange and the version of Norton is 2006. I guess I'm just unlucky in that my email address was chosen for being counterfeited. I get hundreds of emails some days - some are just spam addressed to me (but duplicated about 4 or 5 times I might add) and some are supposedly from my own email address. I have tracked down an IP address which lists some of the 'senders' of the emails purporting to be from myself, to

**.**.142.103 Been to the page but it means very little to me as I'm not into all that techo-language I'm afraid. Not sure whether its one of the good guys or the bad guys, but the Server mentioned is draculahosting.com and somewhere on the page Romania is mentioned so those two things link anyway!!

I'll return to my ISP now and tell them that my system does not have malware installed on it, and see where we go from there with the blacklisting of my sent-emails and them all bouncing back at me.

Regards,

IceFoxx

[edit: Broke IP address for privacy.]

Message Edited by Allen_K on 09-25-2008 12:26 PM

[Floating_Red]

This applies to everyone: The minimum Norton Year Product you should have on your system is 2007 if you want to be fully Protected from Threats; any Product before that is outdated and you should consider Upgrading if you have Windows' X.P. or Vista as soon as possible.