Computer help please. ( zombie computer)

Factual Questions
1

I logged onto to my laptop today and opened my gmail on Opera.

I had about a dozen out of office auto replies. No big deal as its a saturday and these businesses would be closed.

Except I didn’t send any of these emails.

The message body contained a url hyperlink.

Cue over the next few hours other friends telling me I have a virus which is sending them these links and basically … sniggering at me for being dumb enough to catch a virus.

Well I ran Spybot S&D with just a few tracking cookies picked up. I ran AdAware with nothing sinister found. Malwarebytes came back clear.

My Antivirus programme is Panda Cloud Antivirus ( and I will probably sack it once its finished scanning my hard drive and peripheral and flash drives which I have just plugged in )

Now not everyone in my contact list or address book has received the spam. ( just the important feckers!!)

So something is either spoofing my email addy or my laptop is a zombie.

I have visited no sites other than my few usual.

As I say I am rescanning now with my auxilliary drives connected. Is there something else I should do?

Also, this is the first time I have used panda cloud antivirus as I was attracted by the low download size. Should I go back to Avira or AVG?

2

It’s not necessarily that your computer has a virus, but since the emails have been going to your contacts and not random people it looks like your email account has been compromised somehow: http://ask-leo.com/someones_sending_email_that_looks_like_its_from_me_to_my_contacts_what_can_i_do.html

It may not have anything to do with something you did; apparently last year there was a wave of gmail accounts compromised that was thought to be caused by a mobile software bug, but I didn’t find more information about how that was resolved.

Change your password, and change your security questions that let you reclaim your password.

3

Coincidently, I changed my email password yesterday. Also these mails do not appear in my sent folder.

But I’ll check those links thanks

4

This can also occur if you have sent an email to a lot of people via cc:, and a bad guy gets that. They now have a list of people who know manila. So if they send them emails allegedly ‘from’ manila, those recipients are more likely to open them. Most people are now careful about opening emails from people they don’t know. Making it appear to come from someone they know increases the likelihood that they will open it. It might contain some virus, or maybe just a sales pitch they are trying to get people to open and read.

The ‘from’ field on emails is about as insecure as the return address on a postal envelope – anyone can put anything they want there.

In fact, they do just that – I get postal mail disguised in brown envelopes with generic return addresses like “Inspection & Recall Bureau” and notices like “Important Safety Notice!” printed on them. but inside is nothing but a sales pitch from some car dealer about their spring tune-up & inspection.