An email belonging to a friend of mine was recently hijacked. She took the initiative to email to Microsoft to find out how to prevent it from happening.
How to know if your email is hijacked
Sometimes your friend may send you a reply asking you why did you send out a link that leads to either selling online pills, online gambling or porn sites. Or it can be a link to a trojan, adware or malware that is downloaded straight to the user’s PC when it is being clicked on.
Else, another way is that if you have a huge mailing list, you may find that a lot of returned email from Postmaster- probably because some email address are no longer valid. When you open the email, you may notice that it consists of the spam email.
Here’s the reply by Microsoft on how to handle the issue:
Are you able to access your account still, if so, follow these instructions:
Go to http://www.microsoft.com/securityessentials and download and install the program. Let it update, do a full scan, and remove any malware it finds.
Secondly, go to http://www.safer-networking.org and download and install Spybot Search & Destroy, do a full scan, and remove all that it finds.
Next, go to account.live.com and change your password for your email.
Doing this will remove the malware on your system to stop the spam from sending out. Do this on EVERY computer you use to access your email. Try it on a few, your main ones, if it still continues, do it on the others that you use to check your email.
Let me know how it goes, and please pass this around to everyone you know, with everyone being educated on how to fix this issue, the spam issues will stop.
To address your concern about your account being used to send spam messages, please visit:
http://windowslivehelp.com/solution.aspx?solutionid=1fe6ed3e-eef6-4c57-933f-f3c408f1c5c1
