email address book hacked, sending emails with infected URL

I've received six bogus emails the last the past month (Sept 2011) from three different people in my address book. All have short, one or two sentence messages and tell me to click on an URL. I stupidly clicked on the URL in the first email, and was taken to a Russian medsite selling Viagra, etc. I've deleted all the rest as they come, but have saved the headings and message in ASCII text using Magic Mail.

Three of the emails claim to be sent from an iPhone or a "Windows Phone". What is this virus? I've run f-Secure, f-Secure boot disk, Kaspersky boot disk, Avira boot disk and Malwarebytes on my entire computer, taking 5 to 6 hours total each scan. Nothing is found.

Can anyone enlighten me as to what to do? I'm worried that my own email address book has been hacked. Very worried. I don't want to wipe my computer, as it contains everything I've ever done in 10 years. Do I need to wipe and reinstall??

Thank you!!

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

klauzser

I might say that whatever protection you have on your computer, system or server, as long as you made a mistake where you suddenly clicked something online that could probably end to hack issue or malware issue, you can't necessarily change that. Unless you are too good to have it fixed.

d0nar0se

I really appreciate that fast response.

I've not uploaded my address book to anyplace online. Believe it or not, I'm very paranoid about virus, etc. Why I clicked on that URL, I'll never know. It was late at night and I was exhausted. No excuse, though, it was pretty stupid.

I use Thunderbird as an email client, so it's possible the hacker was not able to get my address book. The person I got the two weird emails from this a.m. is a close friend who has a google mail account. But the hacked message was from her old (now unused) yahoo account. I don't even have her yahoo address on my computer. So maybe I'm safe.

Head in the sand.....

Again, thank you so much for your reply.

MJ-perComp

Hi,

even if your address book was hacked into it is too late to do anything about it.

Have you uploaded your address book to google, facebook, some other place?

What do these thre have in common?

Malware on your system would rather SPAM out then generate SPAM locally!

The system is most likely fine. Keep it updated and protected with F-Secure!

HTH