Hotmail Virus?

[gyoung]

The other day my wife's hotmail account sent 3 emails to her entire contact list in her hotmail account. The text of the email was:

Dear friend:
We are wholesale company which can offer you laptops,Digital cameras,videos,GPS , cellphone,mp4,game console and many other electronic products with international guarrantee all over the world.
We can offer you both high quality products and good price. with the new beginning of 2008, we want to have a long term business with you/your company If you want to buy something ,please feel free contact us at:
our website : <http://www..com>
MSN : <x@hotmail.com>
E-mail : <x@hotmail.com>
Welcome to x.com! MSN: x@hotmail.com

I replaced the address with the x. No need to give them more traffic. Any idea how this could happen? How can a Hotmail account be compromised? I find it very hard to believe that they hacked her password. It was a strong password (> 8 characters) with no words. It was comprised of numbers, letters (in upper and lower case). One of her friends replied that she also received another email with the same message from another friend.

At first I thought it was a spoof of her email address, but I actually see the sent message in her sent message folder. It happened 3 times at 11:27am, 11:29am, and 11:32am.

 

[Lemon law]

To gyoung,

I note I have a friend with a hotmail account that was similarly infected. In her case, its sent a Nigerian scam type letter to everyone in her contact list. She ended up deleting that account and creating another as a way to solve the problem.

My guess is that you or your wife clicked on some attachment that carried the infection vector but that is only a guess. I don't know if hotmail has some sort of special vulnerability or not.
Without some sort of process control protections, such scams can infect a computer in mere milliseconds and trigger a whole series of download events. You should check your computer to make sure the hacker did not leave some back door they can later exploit.