Unsuspecting Spammer

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

:o
Hi everyone, first post here, dont know where else to turn…
We got some blue screen stop errors recently, and decided to try Avast Home to see what it would find…and it found and removed a few things and the computer started running better, etc. Anyway, an hour or so after I thought all was well, I notice SPAM litterally flying out of my “Outgoing Mail” through the On Access Scanner. 2-3 emails/sec! I disable the network connection and scan repeatedly, but nothing seems to be able to stop it for long. We also ran Mcafee, and about four other scanners, to no avail. I use only web based email, and didnt even have any accounts setup in Outlook or Outlook express. I even uninstalled ALL of MSOffice ( Cant figure out how to get rid of O-Express but I havent any accounts set there either). How in He@K am I sending emais??

Any help very much appreciated, my laptop , connected wirelessly is also running avast and is NOT spamming!

Please help, Linda

2

Hi and welcome
Try a rootkit scanner like “Blacklight” for you might have one of those which are undetectable by conventional means.
http://www.f-secure.com/blacklight/
Good luck

3

You most certainly have a trojan spam-bot on your system, it most likely has its own smtp client and may be using relaying to send. So getting rid of your email clients probably will have no effect.

What is your firewall ?
That really should be the first line of defence with unauthorised connection to the internet.

Run the rootkit scanner and If you haven’t already got this software (freeware), download, install, update and run it, preferably in safe mode.

  1. Ewido, a.k.a. avg anti-spyware If using winXP. or a-Squared free if using win98/ME.