Today I received 3 emails from a friend of mine. All had the same email address. Only one was really from her. The other two were spam. One said: “Hi! Are you as sick of pop-ups as I am? They are so annoying!”. There was a link to “popswatter.com” enclosed. Well, yes, pop-ups are annoying, but even more annoying is spam with a “fake” email address, especially if it’s a friend’s address, which means you don’t automatically delete it. what nerve! The other one said: “Wow - I just upgraded my email account at Smiley Central.”. There was a link to “smileycentral.com” enclosed. It really bothered me that I was getting spam which looked like “real” email. what I want to know is what caused this. Did my friend’s computer get taken over? something which goes through her address book and sends spam to those addresses? Sure is a hell of a way to sell try to sell something.
You got spyware on your system.
Something may have slipped by, but I’m pretty careful about downloading any “free” programs. Neither of these had any attachments. I checked the “details” and looked at the “Received” line. Both had “from 3prdweb1”. The real email had “email.yahoo”. I thought maybe she had a virus, but I’ll check into looking for spyware on this end. Thanks.
I downloaded and ran Ad-aware. It found “data miners”. Do these cause you to receive fake email?
Your friend’s computer is compromised. Your friend is probably sending out thousands of spam-mails to everyone in her address book and more without knowing it. I read something about this the other day - don’t remember where - and about the only indication is that your computer may slow down some.
It gets even more complicated. It might not be your friend’s computer that’s in trouble. It might be the computer of someone who sometimes sends email to her.
Here’s the simplified scenario: the virus infects the computer of person X. It looks at the address book on person X’s PC, and picks up, among others, the address of person Y. It then sends out spam email from person X’s computer, but constructed in such a way that the messages appear to be coming from person Y. Finally, person Z receives mysterious messages from person Y, yet neither person Z nor person Y has a virus or worm on his or her PC!
I thought viruses only send copies of itself that way. Are there viruses that send actual ads?
Viruses used to merely self-replicate, with the occasional back-door for script-kiddie IRC bots. This year the big thing is viruses & worms turning your machine into either an open relay (spammers can mail through you), or a spam machine in it’s own right. I guess it shows that more and more ISPs are cracking down on spammers, but it sure doesn’t help Joe CableModem98.