sbracco wrote:
I don't know what websites they referred to, but it's alarming that I had 100 of them right after this incident. Normall, Norton finds about 7 in a normal weekly scan.
I'm wondering if all these cookies are related to the malicious access to my Yahoo mail account.
What could be the relation, do you think, if any, between the incident with my Yahoo mail account and all these cookies?
I think the increase in the number of cookies might be due to new and more aggressive cookie hunting by NIS2010. Either way, it should be irrelevant to any other issue. Malware on your computer isn't known to drop cookies. And sites don't drop cookies because your account has been violated.
As for the email spamming under your name:
How do you collect your email? Do you use either of the Outlook programs to collect your email from Yahoo? Do you go to the Yahoo site and view it there? Wherever your address book is kept -- on your computer or on the website, that is the place that was probably violated.
From what you describe, without knowing your response, my guess is that you have the usual kind of malware, an application that has taken over an Outlook (or similar account) and is pumping out copies of itself to your contact list. No genius in that guess, and it is just a guess, but that is about the most common species of malware class making the rounds.
However, before any of us can make any good deductions, we will need to know how your email setup works.
As for NIS protecting you, there is always a window of time between the release of a new variety within a class and its discovery and then its "fingerprinting" and then the release of the detection rules. The industry does its best, but someone always gets hit. In fact, someone has to get hit in order for a new variety to be detected. In this case, it appears to have been you. Hopefully, we will get this dealt with and you won't be the one to get hit the next time.
But, remember, the single best security program is the attitude of the user. Be careful out there.