HELP! My address book has been hi-jacked!

Two days ago I received emails from people in my Yahoo address book telling me they were receiving email (links) from me to sites advertising Viagra! Not just one email, either, several! So…I did a scan, found an affected file and did what Avast suggested. My read out said something like “problem solved” - 0 infected files. Then this AM I received lots more emails saying that people were STILL receiving the Viagra ads, and some porn as well. (A few said “thanks.”) I again went through a scan, but nothing was detected. At this point, I am confused and out of patience. Do I need to take my computer into a repair shop? Change my email address? (I have already changed my password!)

As you can tell by my writing, I am a techie-moron and know little to nothing about how computers operate. Any SIMPLE suggestions you can give me will be appreciated so much!!!

Your machine was cleaned by avast. - Good!
Nevertheless if spammers have already harvested the emails, they will continue using it.
Repair shop won’t help. But yes, you can change your address. Tell it all your friends, so they would know that mails from the old address are spam.
You can also use free Mbam to ensure your system is clean: http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php
asyn

yeah this sort of thing seems to happen more and more with hotmail too, contact list harvested. The spammers don’t actually send the mails “as you” to your friends. They just hack the header a bit so that it looks as you. A quick look of the message source shows where it comes from. Not very useful because they move from server to server constantly, ie when you receive a spam mail from them their address doesn’t exist anymore already. I’m getting such mails on a regular basis on a hotmail address that I rarely use, but still I’m completely fed up with it. It’s still worth reporting. MS managed to “kill” such a spam network recently (people got arrested), a few weeks ago, but they’ve been back already ;D, and quiet again for a few days now (online pharmacy stuff etc…). Just report the spam systematically. As to your address book being hijacked, as said above, there’s not much you can do, it’s too late. Another rule is : never answer those people, you give them your IP. Read here for more: http://www.private.org.il/harvest.html

@Thebigkate:
Btw, not hiding your email address in this forum could also expose you to spammers…!! :wink:
asyn