Hi Ken,
I keep my email window in view during the day to keep an eye open for new mail and suddenly noticed I was getting new mails at the rate of one every second or so, most of them were 'undelivered mail' so obviously my address was sending stuff out all by itself and apparently working its way down my address book! I had a look at one of them in my sent box and it was obviously spam so I shut down my emaill and went online to search for 'AOL Email hack'. There was some suspiciously recent advice from AOL on how to deal with the problem which basically entailed logging into AOL online instead of via my email and changing my passwords and security question etc. I was also using my email password on a couple of other sites so I changed these as well.
AOL had already picked up 'suspicious activity' on my account and I think they blocked it until I changed passwords - I don't know how far down my address book the hack reached though.
I then deleted all cached web pages and ran antivirus scans with three separate packages none of which picked up any obvious threats. However I had the option to delete all my cookies which I did (and meant that I subsequently had to go through the login procedures for all the websites which then ceased to 'remember' me.
)
After rebooting everything seems to be OK so far. Fortunately the spam emails sent out were pretty obvious so probably no harm done. This is the first time something like this has happened to me in ten years so I don't know if the hack was internal to my PC or external at AOL. The only thing I had done before the problem happened was to download the Google Toolbar which should have been safe enough.
Took about two and a half hours to sort it all out though. As far as I can see there is no other damage (fingers and everything else crossed)!
I did notice when 'Googling AOL Email Hack' that there are a number of sites which offer to help you do exactly that! It's a war out there!
Colin
