Inactive Repeat email hijacks! How do I stop this??

[TheWildInside]

I have repeatedly received fwds from friends of emails I "supposedly" sent them .. they contain nothing but a greeting and a link. My friends know these are spam and forward them to me so that I know something's afoot. I have a relatively new Dell Vostro laptop (just about a year old), I don't have a lot of junk loaded on it and I keep it clean (in fact, I just brought it back to the Dell Authorized Sellers I purchased it from for a thorough going over while I was out of town), but these email invasions seem to continue popping up, despite the fact that I change my password repeatedly. Here's an example of the most current header & link info a friend sent me:

-----Original Message-----
From: Karan Cross *email removed*
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2013 10:08 AM
To: tjk[at]xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.com
Subject: the best!

hello traci
sos-credit.c0m/cupboardencouragementstuartcampbel/


This is what they have all looked like pretty much .. MY name, an email address belonging to someone else, but a legitimate "send to" email address from MY email address book. Methinks this is not a virus that can be scanned and cleaned. I've tried .. malware, adware, anti-virus, you name it. The damn things just keep comin' at me! And I wonder how many of these go out to folks are AREN'T alerting me to them.

How do overcome this annoyance and keep it from happening again?

Frustrated - and cold - in northern NY

Karan

 

[Jay Pfoutz]

Hi there!

ComboFix scan

Please download ComboFix

by sUBs
From TechSpot

Direct Link (alternative)

Please save the file to your Desktop.

Important information about ComboFix


After the download:

• Close any open browsers.
• Very Important: Temporarily disable your anti-virus, script blocking and any anti-malware real-time protection before performing a scan. They can interfere with ComboFix or remove some of its embedded files which may cause "unpredictable results". Please visit here if you don't know how.
• WARNING: Combofix will disconnect your machine from the Internet as soon as it starts
• Please do not attempt to re-connect your machine back to the Internet until ComboFix has completely finished.
• If there is no Internet connection after running ComboFix, then restart your computer to restore back your connection.

Running ComboFix:

• Double click on ComboFix.exe & follow the prompts.
• When ComboFix finishes, it will produce a report for you.
• Please post the report, which will launch or be found at "C:\Combo-Fix.txt" in your next reply.

Troubleshooting ComboFix

Safe Mode:

If you still cannot get ComboFix to run, try booting into Safe Mode, and run it there.

(To boot into Safe Mode, tap F8 after BIOS, and just before the Windows
logo appears. A list of options will appear, select "Safe Mode.")

Re-downloading:

If this doesn't work either, try the same method (above method), but try to download it again, except name
ComboFix.exe to iexplore.exe, explorer.exe, or winlogon.exe.

Malware is known for blocking all "user" processes, except for its whitelist of system important processes such as iexplore.exe, explorer.exe, winlogon.exe.

NOTE: If you encounter a message "illegal operation attempted on registry key that has been marked for deletion" and no programs will run - please just reboot and that will resolve that error.

 

[Jay Pfoutz]

How did this go? Update me please!

 

[Jay Pfoutz]

Hello, are you still with us? Please update us with the state of your situation, so we know how to continue from here.

We'd still like to help. Topic marked inactive, until your return.