Email contacts receiving spam message from me

This is the first time ive experienced this problem. My entire contact list on hotmail received a spam message from my email address yesterday. Does anyone know how this was done and possible ways to prevent this from happening again? Im scanning my computer with spybot, windows defender and avast. So far nothings turning up. Any help would be great. thanks!

 

This is one of the older tricks viruses can do. They attach an outgoing spam message to all of your contacts every time you send an email via your web-based email account.

Advise Hotmail of this, login to your account and click on the Contact Us link. This should generate an issue ticket while Hotmail investigates your account.

Meanwhile, you should do a full system scan with whatever anti-virus software you have installed.

Options if you are currently infected.

 

I have thus far scanned my computer with spybot, windows defender, hitman, and avast, all of which have not detected any form of malware on my computer. i really dont understand how they were able to do this... i emailed hotmail and i am hoping i will get a response.

 

I've also experienced the same problem; i even got a spam email with attached virus sent from my own email address and it was sent to the same email address. how could these things happened?

 

Do you use webmail or a mail client (pop/imap)? If you strictly use webmail then the odd are your account was hacked. In that case you should immediately change your password.

 

i got a response from hotmail but it wasnt very useful. Basically just referred me to a link which in turn suggested that i scan my computer for viruses and change my password. I am hoping this doesnt happen again because i really dont want to have to create another account elsewhere.

 

is there a software that will help prevent this kind of stuff from happening and maybe will make it safer to do online transactions etc?