Emails

[ken98k]

Somehow some Canadian drug company is using my email to send advertisements to people in my address book.

I apologize for the inconvenience.

[pacrat]

I have a friend on another forum who is active duty in Sandbox. I've been getting pecker pill adds from his E-mail acct. I know it isn't him sending them, or at least hope not anyway.

[FC]

You probably have a Trojan Horse that's sending these out. I use SpySweeper and Spyware Doctor.

[sayak]

I am having the same problem. Very embarrassing, especially when I have given my e-mail to parents of my students. Is their software compatible with a Mac that will deal with a "trojan horse"?

[pacrat]

For overall virus protection I gave up on the big 2. Which are Norton and Macafee. As described by an IT tech pal for a large banking concern in the DFW area. He actually considers them viruses because they try to take over all aspects of your puter.

 

Primary protection I use AVG which I have found much more effective than either of the Big 2 and cheaper to boot. Bout $55 a yr IIRC.

 

For secondary cleanouts I use http://www.malwarebytes.org/ Free download version.

 

 

And Hitman Pro 3.5 which is also a free download.

 

http://www.surfright.nl/en

 

 

 

As usual............JM2C, and ya get what'cha pay for.

[ken98k]

I used to use norton but like pacrat stated it also takes control of your computer.

Ihave currently been relying on the Microsoft Security Essentials that came with the computer. It gets updated a couple times a week but I guess it is not finding this trojan thing.

[8uck5nort]

I've been in IT for 10+ years so here is my take.

 

E-mail harvesting is a BIG problem.

 

The reality is your computer may not be the one that is infected. It may be someones PC you just happen to know and your address is int their address book. It may be the one infected and it has harvested your address and simply is spewing to commonly known people with your address as the sender when in fact it was harvested out of their computer... If you can't find anything with a currently updated Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware product then the problem may not even be yours. However, until that particular computer is cleaned, wherever it is, you will continue to get reports of "Hey your sending pecker pill e-mails", and you can actually do nothing about it.

 

You might also want to download Windows Defender. It is free from M$. Another layer of defense.

 

The other issue is once a spyware app has a known good e-mail address it is usually sold to known spammers and then it just starts to snowball from there.

 

What you can do about it is very little once your e-mail is known or "listed". Each person on thwe should be running some type of spam filter and it is their responsibility to filter the garbage they don't want.

 

You can always change your address and the spam will go away for a time, but it always will come back.

 

One other thing for all the non-Windows users. They are not immune to this either. It just affects Windows users to a larger proportion since the footprint of machines deployed worldwide are predomintently Windows... So thinking that you just buy a MAC and it will not happen again is an expensive mistake.