I have been hijacked

[Ben Stevenson]

About once a week I receive a msg in my Inbox from some System Administrator
or the like from somewhere telling me that my msg was undeliverable for some
reasons, mostly as the receipient does not exist. I know I never sent those
msgs as I don't even know the reciepients or have anything to do with them.
Obviously someone is using my computer as a zombie or the like, and I have
been hijacked. Anything I can do to remove the hijack/hijacker?
TIA

 

[Gordo]

About once a week I receive a msg in my Inbox from some System
Administrator or the like from somewhere telling me that my msg was
undeliverable for some reasons, mostly as the receipient does not
exist. I know I never sent those msgs as I don't even know the
reciepients or have anything to do with them. Obviously someone is
using my computer as a zombie or the like, and I have been hijacked.
Anything I can do to remove the hijack/hijacker?
TIA

It is not so "obvious." More likely you are just the victim of spam.

 

[Bert Kinney]

Hi Ben,

I would suggest starting here:
Virus and Spyware removal and prevention
http://bertk.mvps.org/html/spyware.html

 

[gls858]

About once a week I receive a msg in my Inbox from some System Administrator
or the like from somewhere telling me that my msg was undeliverable for some
reasons, mostly as the receipient does not exist. I know I never sent those
msgs as I don't even know the reciepients or have anything to do with them.
Obviously someone is using my computer as a zombie or the like, and I have
been hijacked. Anything I can do to remove the hijack/hijacker?
TIA

What's more likely is that someone who has your address is infected with a
virus. The virus just selects a name from the address book to use in the
from field. Consequently when the e-mail gets bounced it comes back to you.
You can go to http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ for a free online scan just
to make sure. If it comes back clean there really not much else you can do.

gls858

 

[CWatters]

About once a week I receive a msg in my Inbox from some System Administrator
or the like from somewhere telling me that my msg was undeliverable for some
reasons, mostly as the receipient does not exist. I know I never sent those
msgs as I don't even know the reciepients or have anything to do with them.
Obviously someone is using my computer as a zombie or the like, and I have
been hijacked. Anything I can do to remove the hijack/hijacker?
TIA

DON'T PANIC

It's probably nothing to do with you or your computer. Most likely a
spammer is pretending to be you and several thousand other people.... It
works like this....

Spammers can't use the same email address to send a million spam emails
because that would be too easy for ISP's to detect and block automatically.
So what they do is they fake the sender details so that their messages
appear to come from thousands of different email addresses (including
yours). Every now and again a spammer will send out a message (pretending to
be from you) and that message will go to a non existant email address and it
will bounce...not back to the spammer but back to you. Thats what you are
seeing.

 

[NoNoBadDog!]

It is more likely that someone who has your email address in their address
book has a worm or a virus. If you follow the advice of the others who
responded, and your system is clean, then it means that someone you know or
exchange email with has an infected machine.

Bobby

 

[Bruce Chambers]

About once a week I receive a msg in my Inbox from some System Administrator
or the like from somewhere telling me that my msg was undeliverable for some
reasons, mostly as the receipient does not exist. I know I never sent those
msgs as I don't even know the reciepients or have anything to do with them.
Obviously someone is using my computer as a zombie or the like, and I have
been hijacked. Anything I can do to remove the hijack/hijacker?
TIA

In all likelihood, there's nothing wrong with your computer. What
does your antivirus application report? To whom have you granted access
through your firewall?

The way many mass emailing worms work is that they send out emails from
the infected machine to every address it finds, and it randomly selects
one of those found addresses to place in the "from" fields. What this
means is that someone else who has your email address in his/her contact
list is actually the infected party. You might consider advising
everyone with who you've recently corresponded that they should all
perform virus scans.


--

Bruce Chambers

Help us help you:



You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having
both at once. - RAH

 

[Clark]

I agree with Gordo, because I get those every now and then. I am sure the
spammer or whoever expects you to open the message to see which one of your
Very Important E-mails did not get to its intended recipient. Did you ever
check what the message was that had been refused?

Clark

 

[Ben Stevenson]

Hi folks

Many thanks to Gordo, Bert Kinney, gls858, CWatters, NoNoBadDog!,
Bruce Chambers, and Clark. From your valuable suggestions, now I know alot
better.
Thanks again.

 

[Bert Kinney]

You're welcome Ben.