Hacked?

[MissWooWoo]

looks like some odd emails have been sent to some of my friends from my hotmail account that I didn't send... like this ...

Hello,
So amazing!I ordered one black apple iphone 3gs 32gb from this website www.savyou.com one weeks ago,today I've got it .Far from my imagination, it's genuine and as good as I expected,but much cheaper.I can't help sharing this good news with you! May all goes well for you.Cheers!

Looks like I have been hacked (? if that is the correct terminology). I had an email like this myself from a friend, but of course just thought it was a proper email so opened it. Is that how bug got into my account and what can I do about it?

Change password on hotmail and secret question.

Also run a virus check on PC.

I'm presuming that you're on a Windows PC and not a Mac?

It would also be worth running downloading and running something like this:
www.lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware_free.php

That will catch things that may not be viruses but could be harmful.

On the positive side it's incredibly easy to fake the email address that an email is from so it might not have been a hack of your account at all, but still run the checks and make the changes suggested.

ok will change password.

surely it must have been hacked if emails were sent to people from my address book?

anyhow, it's done now just want to "undo it" ! thanks for tips and suggestions

It maybe a trojan or something like that. Which is why I recommended a virus scan. Have you got a good firewall and virus package?

Trend Micro is what I use and is awesome but not cheap

MrWooWoo deals with firewalls and what not and does a virus scan every now and then so I think I'd better just leave it until he gets home!

If it went to the people in your address book then there's a reasonable chance that you've been hacked.

Or at somepoint you might have forwarded on one of those "if this gets to 1 million people you'll win a prize/I'll get in the record books/I'll raise money and not die of some disease" type emails to the people you know.

That sort of thing is usually a fake and can be a great way to harvest email addresses.

Aside from anti-virus run a check for "malware" too, that's the sort of thing that my link above will look for.

ah didn't know that about those "chain" emails - although usually I don't pass them on anyhow. You don't know if it's the same thing with texts you get like this do you?