Email Virus

Anyone have any idea how to get rid of an email virus? I seem to have caught an annoying one that sends spam to everyone on your contact list asking them to buy an iphone. So if some of you got an email from me regarding that; it isn't me!

I think I must have caught it when a contact sent one to me and I opened it not realising what it was. Any help would be appreciated.

Yeah sorry about that... my bad

I haven't had any issues lately however.

Wasn't you actually; it was Sangreal.

My virus checker hasn't found anything, so maybe it's a one off hit.

it might be malware as opposed to a virus. Try Ad Aware or SpyBot search and destroy.

What Anti virus are you using?

Superantispyware or malwarebytes are also good spyware removal tools, if you do install spybot S&D, don't install "tea timer" its the most annoying addon ever created, much like zonealarm, and your normal computer user won't even know when to say yes or no to a prompt, even I have trouble fathoming the scale of prompts each of these programs shoves in your face >.>

I have avast antivirus.

I have Spybot too. I thought I had teatimer, but it seems to have been disabled. Probably 'cause it was too annoying. XD

Whatever it is has now wiped my hotmail and messenger contact list.

Edit: Ah teatimer is set to block bad pages silently. I'm running a Spybot scan, so hopefully it can fix something. Spybot hasn't found any bad stuff in ages, so I'm not sure.

Spybot found nothing and I can't get my contacts back. Argh.

Hmm. Two things Id try are looking in your startup list and currently running processes.
These sort of things often run in the background and leave traces.

If you can find any items that you arent sure about in either list, you can google them to check what they are and potentially identify what virus/malware you have.

(Spybot has options to let you view both - look for "Process List" and "System Startup" under the Tools menu in Advanced Mode)

also if your infected already, and its a bad one, then it will most likely be blocking any downloads for your antivirus/antispyware programs, have you updated spybot S&D before you did a scan, if so, did it update correctly?

Id also try downloading and installing/updating malwarebytes.
http://www.malwarebytes.org/

theres also a relatively surefire method of removing virus/spyware that is almost 99% guarnteed of removing your spyware/virus infection without needing to reformat. but im hesitant to suggest unless nothing else is working. apparently theres a very small chance that if the rootkit/virus/spyware infection has infected a file that windows requires to startup, this program may remove it and cause you not to be able to get back into windows without major intervention.

Ran Startup checker and removed a few unnecessary things. Ran registry and disk cleaner. Downloaded malwarebytes and it found something that was blocking my PC's security, so hopefully that was it.

Imported my contacts from Facebook, so got most of them back. Still getting emails from people on my contact list congratulating me on my iphone purchase rofl. Was embarrassing when I got a phone call from my doctor about it.

Thanks for the help.

its very strange that you lost hotmail contacts, as they are kept on a microsoft server, not on your home pc.

Yeah no idea how that happened. I opened up messenger and it told me I had no messenger contacts, so I tried to import them from hotmail and it told me I had no hotmail contacts either lol.

Another good trick for dealing with viruses and the like is to reboot in safe mode to run the scanning and removal tools. This may prevent the virus from being loaded and becoming active.

Thanks, although I hope I don't need to use the tip hehe.

Hey is the chatbox on the front page gone or is it just not showing up for me?