Need help from you computer wizards, please

[anniemac]

My SO's email has been hacked, I think. He hasn't been on his netbook in a couple of days and when he opened his AOL email today there was all this 'sent' email from yesterday from his email to a whole bunch of folks we don't know and it's the same spammy stuff.

How did this happen and what do I do about it? I cleaned his computer really good and nothing showed up. A couple of weeks ago he had a trojan/virus/worm or whatever but I managed to kill it.

We use the same internet provider - thru a router. I'm not having any trouble.

Any ideas?

 

[bAdSmoker]

Download the following programs.

"Not sure if i'm allowed to post the links to the direct sites". Just google them and you should find them.

CWShredder
HijackThis
Spybot S&D
Spyware Terminator
Zone Alarm Free - Firewall

Install and Update the software.

Run scans and let the programs do their jobs.

 

[chayton]

Is it web-based email or running off the computer? If it's web-based then just changing the password to something hard to crack - like a random string of numbers and letters - would probably be enough. With all the hack attacks going on right now it might not have anything really to do with the virus that you had - seems the hackers are targeting big well known companies, they hacked gmail not that long ago too.

If it's not web-based mail.....Make sure you turn off system restore before running a virus scan, most viruses hide a copy of themselves in your backed up data - you think you've gotten rid of it but it comes back.

I usually turn off system restore and do a 'boot time' scan - takes a lot longer (especially with all those HUGE MG casinos I have installed!) but usually gets the little buggers if they're hiding somewhere in the system that you can't really search while windows is running.

I had a stupid dialer malware once, I'd get rid of it and it would pop back up again - drove me nuts for awhile til I found out where it was replicating from. Thank God for ZoneAlarm, though.

EDIT: Probably goes without saying, but if the computer is clean of viruses and spyware and your firewall and virus software are updated, remember to change all the passwords.