Help with possible virus

[jollybrown]

Hi

I'm hoping someone can help me. I've been reading through some of the threads on trojans and worms etc but I've just managed to confuse myself. I know the basics but some of the details on the other threads were a bit beyond me!

I have a hotmail account and over the past few days all of my address book have received emails with a link on. Some are short bit. links and others are links to online gaming / other things which I don't access! I've ran a Mcafee scan which didn't find anything. How can I stop these emails. I've read that it might just be as simple as changing my password. Will this help?

Thanks to everyone in advance.

[afidelino]

The mails might be spam you can just ignore them Or you might have subscribed to some of the gaming sites or other site and then you are sending you mails of their product update. If you need to un-subscribe these site then you will find a link at the bottom of those mail. If you think that some one else is playing with your inbox then you can try changing the password.

[jollybrown]

Thanks for the reply. That's what's concerning me, I haven't subscribed to any sites. I don't go on gaming sites and certainly not any of the other sites the links point to! The emails are being 'sent' from my address to all of my contacts. They have no subject matter and just 1 link in them pointing to a very dodgy site. I think it might be some sort of virus but I just don't know how to get rid of it.

[Snake08]

For this do not click on external links except you know the email ids. The most common way to infect a computer is through a email attachment of website link in a mail. Once you click on them you are redirected to a website automatically. If you have a good Internet Security suite then only your antivirus scans the mails else nothing happens. You will start getting ads popups on your screen continuously. Most of the email service provides you option of mark as spam for the mail you received. Once you give the option the email id is moved to junk folder and the mails go their and sometime are blocked also.