Recently, some of my close friends contacted me, complaining that they have been receiving spam messages from me. In fact, one of my friends logged into his email account in my presence and showed me the rubbish I have been sending to him. I was shocked.
You know why? It’s simply because I was not the one that sent the messages to him and do not know anything about the messages at all. Instantly, I googled for the problem and realized there are loads of other victims online. After some thorough research, I was able to stumble on a solution, which I decided to share with you today.
What causes this to happen is probably a virus, trojan or malware that you have invited (unknowingly of course) by clicking on a particular link or downloading a file from the internet it was attached to and was given permission to run . It lurks in the background until you log online, then it turns your computer into a “Spam Engine” and starts sending rubbish to everyone in your contact list.
Let’s cut the long story and get to how you can stop it and prevent future occurrences. Follow these easy steps below:
- Firstly, clear all your history, cookies, saved passwords, active logins, cache, offline data & search history.
On Mozilla Firefox simply press CTRL+SHIFT+DEL, ensure all the boxes are check before pressing “Clear Now”.
- Goto CNET.com and download “ Malwarebyte Anti-Anti Malware ” (Its free of charge). Once downloaded, run and update it.
- Now run your Malwarebyte program and perform a “ Full Scan ”
- After the scan, log into your Yahoo! Mail, click on Account Settings ==> passwords . Then change your password (Choose a STRONG password different from the first one). If you have multiple Yahoo accounts, its advisable to use different passwords for each of them.
- Then send a message to all your contacts saying, “ I’m sorry if you’ve been receiving unwanted messages from my email. My account was compromised but I’ve resolved it now. Thanks ” .
- After this, sign out from your Yahoo account, clear your recent data once again, run a full scan again then restart your PC.
After these steps, I’m pretty sure the Virus/Malware would have been totally removed from your system.
It worked for me so I’m sure it will work for you too.
If you’ve got questions or contributions to make, kindly make use of the comment form below.
Cheers!
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