gameboy said:
When some unwanted applications gains access to your PC they harvest your email 'in' and 'out' box for addresses you have 'sent' or 'recieved' mail they then use these addresses to send their spam.
That is why you receive bounced 'undelivered' mail that you never originally sent.
This enables the scammer to remain anonymous.
Very true BUT I have heard of people sending trojans / backdoor through this method too.
Sometimes a person that doesn't know much about this things will open the attachment, thinking it's the message, and get infected with a backdoor Once you have a backdoor in your system you are at the mercy of a hacker.... to start with, he will disable your AV and could even change your registry so that when you receive an attachment you think is safe to open, ie .gif, but it's now an executable....
Most people think a backdoor is similar to a virus but IMO it's worse. A virus will do the damage and that's it... you would know that you have a virus, however, a backdoor works differently... most of the time it comes through an email or a program that you download.... A hacker could bind together a picture and a backdoor into an executable file.... if you don't know what you are doing you could happily double click on the executable and you will see the picture but in the background the backdoor will quiatly install itself and inmediatelly disable your AV. From that moments onwards the backdoor would use a way to notify a hacker your IP address whenever you go online so that, he with the aid of another program, can control your PC... he could find out what windows you have apened, what you are typing, view you hard disk as you do through file explorer, etc,etc. So... you are indeed at the mercy of the hacker... if he doesn't like you he could destroy your system in seconds or simply spy on you.
You might be wondering how come I know all this!!! Well, about 4 years ago I found something wear in my PC and I set out to find out what is was.... eventually I found that it was a backdoor and somebody was playing jokes on me... disabling the keyboard, the mouse, etc... I decided to buy the best AV I could find and after reading from different AV vendors I still wasn't sure who to believe.... until one day I had a thought... whom, apart from vendors, should know about AV? Hackers!!!! the next step was to find a few websites and there is where I learnt all this and much more...
Most importantly, I learnt that Norton AV is pretty and easy to use but is C.R.A.P. as AV
Sometimes you look at your startup programs and you can't tell a good program from a bad one unless you have some information on the subject... a good program could be registered as MSN.exe while a bad one could be registered as MSN.EXE... From time to time I double check the entries on my startups against w*w.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php I'm sorry I went way off course with this thread....
Salvador
