Hijacked email. My email is sending out spam to everyone in my contact list. What can I do?

My Yahoo mail account (with my name on it) is sending out email to everyone in my contact list. These are highly confidential contacts in my personal list and I am concerned about privacy, confidentiality, and the perpetuation of harmful viruses. What can be done to stop this from happening? THESE EMAILS ARE NOT COMING FROM ME!
Hijacked email. My email is sending out spam to everyone in my contact list. What can I do?
You likely have a virus bot-net bug or "melissa" type virus deep within your PC. IF you have a anti-virus scanner ( all PC users online should have one that's updated every other day ), get one like AVG (free edition) and use spyware detectors like Spybot Search N' Destroy, Crap Cleaner and/or Malwarebyte's Anti-Malware.





Yahoo help or Symantec help might be of some assistance if you check out their sites for such. You can also go to suggestafix.com for some free help as well.





Once your PC is clean of the bot-net nasties, hard copy your address book, and delete your old email account. Create a new email account with a good password. Then, put in all your trusted contacts and send them a email advising them NOT to accept ANY mail from your OLD email address. Assure them the NEW email address is safer for them to contact you.





Use caution when using WiFi laptops near free WiFi locations; it's better to access your email at home than using public Internet PCs like the ones in a public library.
Reply:Sounds like you picked up a virus.


Immediately have your computer checked for a bug or 'bugs.'


Once it is clean of pests, install a firewall and an anti-virus program if you do not have one yet.


I strongly recommend a program for malware and adware also.


Changing your password may not be enough to secure your E-mail account again, but try it and see how it behaves.


You may have to open a new one with a different ID name and password.
Reply:The same thing happened to me 2 months ago... and the same is also happening to a friend of mine on my contacts list who hasn't been online for months since she left away for college.





What you can do is:





- Log out of your email as soon as your signing off the net (don't use that thing that says "sign in every 2 weeks" as it will keep your account open to anyone using your computer.





- Visit the yahoo!help page at http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/ . You can tell them that your experiencing fraud. Make sure that you save any of the fraud mail you've witnessed because when you contact yahoo! about this they'll ask you to paste one of the fraud emails along with your problem (this way it will be easyer for them to know whats going on).