Mac desktops forum: Sending Out Spam!?!?

Thanks ever so much for the reply.


The password part of my account the other day was very odd, I couldn't log into my e-mail account which was really weird, fortunately it wasn't my AOL master account so I could go in and change the password.
On the spoofing side of things is there anything I could have done to avoid this or is it just they selected an e-mail address at random? It just seems strange that it went hand in hand with the problems with my e-mail password!?!? What should I do, or is there anything that I can do if it continues?

I assume there is not likely to be anything harmful on my Mac that might be gathering personal information?

regards

Mat

However, should you be inclined, then you might want to check your system.

You could download Sophos for Mac, http://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-antivirus-for-mac-home-edition.aspx, It is free, and after running it you and finding your system clean you can decide to keep or uninstall the program.

Is looking for viruses, trojans, and worms. It is free just as is ClamAVX, and what they both likely to find, most often than not if they do encounter a threat, are Windows malware.

Both are respected programs and both work well in the background and are not very intrusive.

If I do nothing else but do no harm to those Windows users I communicate with electronically, not sending any infected files onward, then these free programs do their job.

No... No they're not. Sophos is FAR from respected by anyone who's ever been made to suffer the torture that is using it. Long story short, I know someone who used to have conference calls with Sophos, and at one point they called their own program crap according to this person, whom I trust not to exaggerate or make up these kinds of things.

Sophos is kind of the redheaded stepchild of the AV world. It seems to take some of the worst elements of Norton and combine them with some of the worst elements of McAfee. The ridiculously and inexcusably inefficient scanning engine of McAfee which takes huge gulps of CPU time on a continual basis, and the generally bloated and incomprehensible interface of Norton along with a rather ineffective detection system.

ClamAV is a noble effort, and I really do hope one day they actually manage to make something that will be a worthwhile substitute for the commercial products out there, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Unless I fell asleep and missed it, ClamAV still lacks a resident scanner component. It's still back in the early 90s of AV programs where you have to do manual scans.

But I don't even get why we're bothering to discuss this. It's pretty clear that someone was just sending out spam using the OP's email address as the sender, even though it wasn't coming from the OP's machine. Honestly, I can configure pretty much any email program out there to do something similar if I wanted, it's been a pretty standard feature of email clients for almost as long as there's been email. It has some perfectly legitimate uses, but it can also be used to send out fake messages. I don't really understand why there's any need to promote paranoia on this particular subject when the first reply nailed it pretty effectively as something outside of the control of the OP.