ID Theft - How to prevent mail ID theft?

How to prevent mail ID theft?

For the past few days my friends complain that they hav been receiving irrelevant mails from my ID which i have not send. All those mails have had an attachment and obviously the attachemnts had virus in them! I changed my password but how could i make sure that this does not happen again! Is there a possiblity of filing a complaint with the yahoo customer care? This is my main ID and I would lose lot of mails if i change it! what could i possibly do! My last option would be to deactivate my ID. what else could i do to save my ID. Please suggest!

Public Comments

Sounds like you have a virus.
This could be from a virus on your computer as well. There are viruses that attack YIM that will make your computer send IMs or even emails when you are logged in and you won't even know it.
Your computer has either a virus or spyware which is what's causing the e-mails to be sent, probably, to everyone in your address book. Would suggest that you do a virus scan and a spyware scan.
First things first... Never indulge in email forwarding... If you do, your email id is definitely at risk! Thats because each time you forward a mail, a list of 100's of email address is forwarded, which if falls in some spammers hand..you are at risk! Secondly, never give out your email address to websites which just are interested to get a form filled up every now and then... If you seriously need those websites, maintain a separate email address for such websites... Thirdly, if you publish your website, blog online...never give out your email address in standard format like:me@anydomain.com Instead you can type: me AT anydomain.com This is because, various webpage scanners are employed by spammers to collect valid email address strings embeded in the webpage! If you take care of these three things...you wont be having a problem ever! As of your main problem, well..your email id is already in wrong hands which is a problem... Its mainly a spyware or trojan on your computer or someone else's which is exploiting your address book & mailing viruses to everyone else.. Get a online spyware scan from: http://www.trendmicro.com/spyware-scan/ Get a online virus scan from: http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ I would recommend you to shift to another account & dont forget to maintain separate accounts for personal & misc emails... This way you directly restrict the threat to yourself... Hope this helps...
This possibilty exists. Either your computer, or another computer that has your e mail address on it, is badly infected with a virus to allow another person to send out thousands of spam e mails a day. "In 2003, spam investigators saw a radical change in the way spammers sent spam. Rather than searching the global network for exploitable services such as open relays and proxies, spammers began creating "services" of their own. By commissioning computer viruses designed to deploy proxies and other spam-sending tools, spammers could harness hundreds of thousands of end-user computers." "Most of the major Windows e-mail viruses of 2003, including the Sobig and Mimail virus families, functioned as spammer viruses: viruses designed expressly to make infected computers available as spamming tools" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_%28e-mail%29#Spammer_viruses In short the infected computer becomes under control of the spammer and becomes his own personal e mail server. All you can do is be sure that your computer is free of virus, worms and trojans. Here is a good clean-up procedure if your currently are lacking one. 1. Scan for virus and remove (free online scan) with BitDefender http://www.bitdefender.com/site/home/... 2. Scan for trojans and remove (free online scan) with Ewido http://www.ewido.net/en/ 3. Scan for ad/spyware and remove (free download) with Spybot Search & Destroy http://www.safer-networking.org/en/spybo... If your computer is clean, then all you can do is wait until the owner of the infected computer that is sending spam with your address relalizes what is going on and cleans-up his computer. For further infomation you can Google the word "botnet" Good luck