Spamming from hotmail accounts.

OK, to put it simply.
My mother is computer illiterate & I am some what as well.
She called me saying she keeps getting these "Sending Failed Messages" on her hotmail account & she told me to look at it, so I did.
I went through & this is what had tried to send. ( I removed my mums email & the recipients email for privacy reasons. )
Now I'm unsure how to get rid of this? or if there is anything I can do with it?
Mum has tried to contact Hotmail & has not had any reply.
Any suggestions would be appreciated as I really do not want things like this on mums computer in case she clicks the wrong thing or enters her details into something she shouldn't.





Delivery Status Notification (Failure)‏
From: postmaster@mail.hotmail.com
Sent: Thursday, 12 November 2009 6:33:16 AM
To: ***My mums email***

Attachments: 2 attachments | Download all attachments (3.1 KB)
ATT00001 (0.3 KB), Re.mht (2.8 KB)

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

Delivery to the following recipients failed.

***The persons email it was trying to send to***






--Forwarded Message Attachment--
From: ***My mums email***
To: melbenang@bigpond.com
Subject: Re:
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:31:26 +1000








Heya,how are you doing recently ? I would like to introduce you a very good company which i knew.Their website is www.topelebiz.com. They can offer you all kinds of electronical products which you need like laptops ,gps ,TV LCD,cell phones,ps3,MP3/4,motorcycles etc........Please take some time to have a check ,there must be somethings you 'd like to purchase .
Their contact email: topelectrad@188.com. MSN:topelectrad@hotmail.com
Hope you have a good mood in shopping from their company !
Regards
7

Hello,

This may happen because the e-mail your mum is trying to send to is inactive or non-existent. Another possibility is that Hotmail is automatically detecting the e-mail as spam. You can get more info here:

http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx

or try contacting them again here:

https://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=edfsmsbl&ct=eformts&scrx=1

I've basicly been having the same problem with my msn/hotmail account, one day i was sitting here and like a dozen postmaster failures came flashing up, something is generating and sending emails to my contacts list, the ones that are no longer active would come back as postmaster failure, which would have the attachment ATT00001 and whatever.mht, the mht attachment would have different names but would link back to various websites.webs.com the ATT00001 if you open, the securiy pop up would say (Which I'd click "do not allow" when prompted) microsoft host process (rundll32). I've been told that my computer has sent these email as much as 5 times in the past few days. I've ran various anti-virus programs all on full scans, ( ilio system mechanic, trendmicro housecalls, microsofts anti malware) and none have picked up anything. I've ran a search on my computer looking for this ATT00001 file, and found nothing. Its driving me and all my contacts crazy. Immediately after the 1st time it happened, I send out an email with subject "DO NOT OPEN ANY OF MY EMAILS MAY CONTAIN VIRUS"
I too would love to know how to get rid of this. Trying to get help from micosoft on this matter is near impossible.

I think you should consider a visit to the malware experts. Open a thread here.

What could be happening is that you have a malware on your computer that is spamming, using YOUR account and that´s why you are getting the postmaster failures back.

Just an idea.

Thx for the reply Gabe, shortly after posting here, I did find basicly the same topic on msn forums, their sujestion was to change password AND security question, that it maybe more of an account hijack rather than malware. So, yesterday I did just that, we'll see if that solves the problem. I've ran multiple anti-virus/anti-malware programs, but none of the have found anything, also forwarded one of the postmaster failure returns to my AV provider to see what they say. Will keep you updated if this worked or if I find a solution, so whoever else runs into this problem, will know what to do.

Note that nowadays there is malware that is not found by commercial antivirus/antimalware programs.

If you suspect you have malware problems, please read this and after that post here.