Mail Hijacker or Spam Flood?

I usually recieve about 4 emails a day from known sources. Spam is usually minimal--about 5 or so a week-- I mark these as known spam sources. My browser is Opera 9.23

My firewall is Look'n' Stop; NOD 32 is daily updated; Spy - Search & Destroy is updated every two weeks or so. Comodo BO Clean runs constantly

Today I received in excess of 120 emails--many. many seeming to be Mailer Daemons informing me of undelivered emails that I supposedly sent. Assuming that I had a hijacker using my computer to send out emails, I ran an updated NOD 32 virus deep scan--no results. Spybot was updated and run--no results.

When I read a few of the "Mailer Daemons" many, many, (but not all) were apparently camouflaged adverts for "authentic copies of Rolexes" and other expensive watches. Others were mesages from folks who informed me that my emails were being returned by their "superior spam filters".

At this point it seems that a very annoying and "clever" spam filter is being pimped.

Has anyone else received these emails?

Thanks in advance.

 

Yes, one of my friends got hundreds of the same type of spams today, 700 or 800, maybe even more, we didn't keep track. They seemed to come in a "burst" at about 9am Pacific time. He uses MailWasher which took much of the chore out of cleaning up the mess. http://www.mailwasher.net

 

No, but a few yrs back when I came home from work and jumped on pc to find my Aol account was closed. I phoned AOL to find out I suppose to have sent 500 hundred porn picture to people all over in less then a minute,is what I was told.Boy did I get some nasty IM from people threating for law actions.talk about nervis any way issue was resolved at least with Aol.needless to say No longer use Aol.

 

We got another huge dump this morning, over 1k spams, most phonied to look like bounces.

 

Thank you both!

My obvious fear is that an invisible? hijacker has been present. But my clean virus report, clean malware report, and your story of a friend that is having a similar experience (my flood maximum yesterday occurred within an hour of your friend's) also underlines the probability that this is an email scam/flood.

My volume has tapered off--about 25 today. So I assume that if I simply do not respond, that this will slowly die down because of inaction.

Any other thread readers with similar experiences will help verify this.

Thanks to all.

 

At Country IP Blocks we've been monitoring a siginificant rise in malicious botnet traffic. In fact we've seen an increase of over 500% in April over the first three months of this year.

These botnets are spoofing various email addresses and then sending out thousands of emails around the globe. Many of these emails are generated randomly and some contain a malicious payload. This payload can infect both the recipients and owner of the email account if he/she opens certain bounced-back emails.

We recommend that you add filters to your email client(s) to watch this inbound traffic and seperate it either for instant deletion (based on certain criteria) or further examination.