Greekz :Zombie pc in my house!(?) started getting weird nondeliverable email mailer daemons from unknown addresses in europe I know I didn't send.Could I have a mailer 'bot hidden (?) running vista home premium on a nhp amd phenom x4 Anybody got any comments or suggestions on spybot? I have avg running is that enough?
Your addy has been picked up somehow and is being spoofed into e-mail return addies generated by a spammer, and there's no way to know how, nor any way to control it. It very well could be that a random address generator just happened upon yours some how, and liked it for some reason. AVG is usually enough as long as you don't open any attachments. DO NOT bounce them back to sender, that simply confirms that your addy is good. Your incoming e-mail and surfing is protected. (Bold for emphasis.) Do a full scan, all drives, you may (unlikely) have a zombie on board. If your machine is actually sending messages, you must have already noticed a gross slowdown of your processor, if that is so, look for a zombie or trojan, but AVG should have picked up on it, if you are updating regularly. Hit ctrl/alt/delete and open the process manager to see what application is hogging resource. If the process is your e-mail client, you are infected. If your machine is running normally, there is nothing to be done. Any spam coming in should be sent to spam@uce.gov in case they want to chase the buggers for illegal activity. Not likely, but possible. I have spybot search and destroy, it hasn't caught much lately. Good catcher most of the time, so I guess I've been lucky lately. A couple years back it caught HUGE quantities of crap. Also, FWIW, I've been plagued with spam here at home, recently up to 25 per hour, but down to about 5 an hour the last week or so.
go to www.malwarebytes.org and download the free version. Then update it and then run a quick scan to see what it finds first. If it finds nasties in there, it will usually ask for a reboot to clean the memory processes that might holding something as well as registry edits. Then run a full scan and let it clean anything that might have gotten hidden somewhere else in the system. You can run malwarebytes free you just have to update it and run it manually at your leisure, but it is a very effective anti-malware tool. Spyware is way different than viruses or worms that most anti-virus tools detect. You can also go to http://housecall.trendmicro.com and run a free online scanner to have it check your system after malwarebytes does its thing. A couple different tools like this is better than relying on just one as different tools usually detect some things the other one didn't find.
I've been running mb for about two years in parallel with AVG, Spybot and Spyware Terminator, no problems on the desktop. (ST also free ver.) Early on, mb picked up a bit of junk, but nothing recently. The price is right -- Running Norman on the laptop, looks like it does it all rather than messing with 4 separate programs. Slow, but seems thoro.
