posted
i received a letter from my adsl supplier (BT Broadband) saying
'it has been brought to our attention that your BT Broadband account has been used for sending unsolicited email. Please stop this activity immediately. Any repetition of it, or similar activities, will lead to your account being closed.'
i only send about 5 emails a month - WTF are they talking about? How do i stop doing something i'm not doing in the first place?
i don't have a firewall or anything - is it possible for spammers to hack into my pc and use it to send spam?
posted
I know that BT has had huge email problems in the last two days... Sending emails to their account holders without html formating and filled with headers (which normally are 'hidden')... You may have had a 'hiccup' during their problem...
To answer you question about a hacker, the short answer is, yes.
If you aren't running a firewall, you are basically asking for trouble. You can get free ones from ZoneAlarm (depending on your morality, you can get the paid for one for free to with alittle online searching).. Before installing it though, I highly recommend you download and run Adaware and run an online Virus checker...
What probably has happened if it isn't BT's screw up is that someone scanned your machine (port scanning) and found a vulnerablility and slipped a trojan/virus/worm into your machine and it is now using your machine as a mailserver (and anything else the 'hacker' wants)...
You also may want to run Windows update to plug up any holes that might exist....
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posted
Zone Alarm now up and running. i am getting about 800 attempts to access my pc per hour.
online gaming is now smooth as silk whereas before it was pretty jerky which i was putting down to lag.
i think it's pretty clear that while i've been happily surfing around and playing shoot-em-ups my pc has been churning out viagra and teen sex emails like a bastard!
let this be a warning to those without a firewall!
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