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I just logged in to my gmail and was shocked by the amount of automatic responses I got in my inbox. I then looked at my sent messages folder and noticed that apparently, thousands of spam e-mails were sent using my gmail to all my contacts.
These people include trusted contacts such as university and work application managers aswell as other important people.
Now that the e-mails have already been sent, what can I do to control the damage done as much as possible? Should I send all those contacts another e-mail explaining the situation? Note that that would mean that another 5000+ e-mails are being sent from my account (which is probably already flagged as "spam"). If I don't clarify however, this will lead to awkward situations.
I checked the IP history and it also says that some IP has logged in to my account 45 minutes ago. I do not know this IP, so the mails must've been send at an other location with my password. I changed my password, but the mails have already been sent.
I am lost here and only see very bad outcomes of the situation, whatever I do. Should I maybe contact google? What do you recommend?
Should I format my PC? I actually formatted two weeks ago to install windows 7. I did download a few applications meanwhile though, but these came from reliable sources. Spybot search & destroy returned 0 results, and so did avast anti-virus and Ad-Aware. – Tom – 2009-11-21T15:03:50.940
@Tom - formatting is one option (albeit the nuclear one) and not one I'd recommend as the first choice, but if you've not got much installed and are happy doing it then go for it. – ChrisF – 2009-11-21T15:07:00.887
Could you please elaborate your answer a bit more? For example, I am obviousely very interested in what would be your first choice, keeping all the things I've already done in mind. – Tom – 2009-11-21T15:09:08.900
Update: the question of the comment above should have been "Is it even possible to solve this situation when Spybot search and destroy, avast anti-virus and Ad-Aware all returned 0 results other than formatting the whole hard disk?" – Tom – 2009-11-21T15:15:10.590
@Tom - my first choice would be to do what you've done and then closely monitor the account for further hacking attempts. If nothing else happens then you've fixed the problem without "going nuclear". However, some people would recommend reformatting straight away. – ChrisF – 2009-11-21T15:16:17.997
How can the problem be fixed when there has only be searched but no action has been taken as nothing was found? – Tom – 2009-11-21T15:23:25.470
@Tom - because the hacking of your account wasn't achieved through keylogging, but I suppose the question of how your account was compromised still remains. However, it would still remain if you reformatted your hard drive again. – ChrisF – 2009-11-21T15:30:01.730
I doubt that those programs would find any keylogger in the world, so there is still a chance that it is achieved through keylogging. How would it have been achieved otherwise? If something strange would have happend on Google's side it would probably be all over the news already. I just checked and it isn't so it must be on my side. I also know that I did not share any of my passwords with anyone. – Tom – 2009-11-21T15:40:06.810
spelling mistake: any = every* – Tom – 2009-11-21T15:40:53.580
@Tom - those programs mentioned above will not find keyloggers, that's for certain. Try searching for some specialized software for that purpose (none come to mind right now), since keyloggers usually only do two things: keylog (duh), and hide, and some are very good at it. – Rook – 2009-11-22T03:12:57.727