Virus?
 

Recently I started receiving 5-10 spam emails daily from porn sites, medicine suppliers and 'organ enlargement specialists'. It coincides with allowing a couple of teenagers to use the laptop to surf the net (I know, stupid move..). The question is, how compromised is my machine? The spammers have somehow worked out my email address (would be interested to know how) but is that it? Multiple AVG scans report no viruses or other nasties but can I be sure the laptop is safe to use for internet banking etc? What should I do to ensure all is ok? Thanks for any suggestions.

cheers

Octane

Have a good think back over the last few weeks, who have you given your email address to? Have you bought anything over the internet? Have you, (or the teenagers), enrolled for any web sites?

A possibly answer is that your address has been sold on to the spammers, maybe an organisation you decided not to do business with, like buying software etc.

I use Mailwasher Pro with a reporting and bouncing facility, that reduces spam to a bare minimum.

Mailwasher Pro is indeed the way to go. It enables you to check your mail whilst it is still at the ISP server. You can delete and bounce anything you don't care for, and download the rest. It may take a while to overcome the problem you now have, but in time you should be pretty well rid of the stuff.

My current ISP (Internode) has a excellent spam filter anyway. It needs to be checked from time to time, because just occasionally a useful email can be trapped there as a false positive.

It sounds like you've done most of the things needed to check your machine for nasties. Malwarebytes is an excellent checking program which you may care to also download and run, just in case AVG has somehow overlooked something.

If your machine passes that test also, I would be inclined toward a fair degree of confidence that all is well.

FWIW
FOR

I second the free Malwarebytes. I also use the free Superantispyware which has, at times, picked up stuff that MBAM has missed.

As far as I know I haven't bought anything online or do anything other than routine stuff i.e. emailing, ppruning etc. I'm pretty sure whatever occurred coincided with the kids activity (They know 'nothing' ala Sgt. Shultz..). I downloaded Malwarebytes as suggested and it found backdoor.hupigon which it seems to have eradicated. I'll be de doing a few rescans before I bank..Thank you all for your advice.

Cheers

Octane

Thanks for the report. Googling that particular nasty confirms that it needs to be treated with caution, so a rescan - possibly with another product known to be effective on this species - may be advisable.

Microsoft have a useful series of pages on this one also.

Looks like one just can't be too careful these days :suspect:. Hope it all turns out well.

Regards
FOR