Am I a Spam Zombie?

ReallyCurious asks: "Recently, I've noticed a lot of junk email in my inbox reporting 'Mail delivery failure' or 'Undeliverable'. Some of these had documents attached, so I figured this was just a worm variant. But these messages keep coming. I worry that my machine has been turned into a 'Spam Zombie'. I don't see any suspicious processes running, but maybe it only runs for a few seconds, and at irregular times. I run a Windows 98 laptop, sometimes wirelessly connected to broadband (a few hours a day, on average), but I had to remove my virus software years ago because it was locking my system up, so I'm wide open. I've tried to be a good citizen and have been shopping for new virus software, but prices are running $40-$70, and most of these are just for upgrades (not even counting the mandatory 'subscriptions')! Is there an open or free virus fighting solution that's reliable and available for Windows? I'd be happy to run it ASAP."

Comments

Well...

[hookedup]

It may not be your system spewing out spam, but simply someone spoofing your domain.. happens to me every once in a while

You should be fine.

[FrenZon]

Most likely your email address is getting used as the return address and little more - the returned mail thing affects everyone to some degree. If you were being used as a spam zombie, you'd probably not notice any change in returned mails, as the zombies generally use someone else's address again as the return addy. I'm fairly sure the return addresses aren't always randomised, as on my domains I see a bucketload of spam all from the same email address, so whoever lives there must be getting a bucketful of bounces.

Still, you really should get an antivirus solution to ease your worries. I use AVG from Grisoft, which is available in a free edition.

Of course, the bounces are plain annoying - when I get ACTUAL bounces from mail I send, I often delete them based on subject line, not realising that the person I was trying to contact is none the wiser. Booo

maybe...

[johnjones]

ok if you run windows you need a virus checker

are you a home user ?
if so

http://free.grisoft.com/freeweb.php/doc/2/

and get avg for free
Now you need a firewall

http://www.free-firewall.org/

then I would advice get rid of spyware with spybot
donate something to the project if you like it...

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/


regards

John Jones

AVAST

[chadkiser]

http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html Home version is free

Most likely a 'Joe-Job'...Ask your ISP about SPF

[rthille]

Since the SMTP protocol doesn't have any authentication of the sender (except within an ISP/Domain with SMTP-AUTH), it's easy for a spammer/virus to send mail pretending to be you. That's called a 'joe-job' after one of the early occurrences of it.
A recently proposed solution (though not without it's problems) is SPF (Sender Policy Framework) http://spf.pobox.com/ where a domain owner can publish the list of servers which are authorized to send mail as being from a user of their domain.
Until it's widely deployed, not just on the publishing side, but on the checking side, it won't be real useful. However it's nearly trivial for the DNS owner to publish the records and since big ISPs like AOL and Yahoo are starting to check them it does protect you from being Joe-Jobbed to a large number of mailboxes.