IT/Computer People...Help!

About a month ago, I started seeing some strange emails in my Hotmail account. They were your typical spam stuff with links and whatnot, but they were sent from me to people on my contact list, and a few had been bounced back. I looked in the Sent folder, and there were a bunch. I changed my password, and noticed that my vacation reply was on (I never turned it on) and set to send more spam stuff.

At the same time, my Facebook, Pinterest, and Gmail accounts all gave me "We detected an unathorized login from such-and-such a place" or whatever when I tried to sign in. Changed all the passwords. My Pinterest had some spam pins, but I noticed nothing weird on the other two.

Fast forward to this week. A couple people have been telling me that they've gotten weird website link spam emails from me, but I haven't found them in the Sent folder or the Deleted folder.

So...any advice? Why this keeps happening? I am running an antivirus on my computer, but I'm not very savvy with that kind of thing, so I'm not sure how good it is. I also login to Facebook and Hotmail and whatnot from my phone and from school. I do a lot of online banking/financial stuff, but I watch that like a hawk, and haven't noticed anything.

Thanks in advance!

Change your passwords again - this time to something very different and try to use a strong password if you're not already. Capital letters, numbers, and special characters. Definitely run an antivirus and back up all of your stuff NOW. If all else fails you can reinstall Windows.

ETA: Check your hotmail and gmail settings too - I've never heard of the vacation auto reply being set before. Also, I'm sorry you keep having to deal with this. I've had it happen to my hotmail and it sent out porn links to my parents. LOL. My in-laws also had it happen and theirs sent out discount viagra links.

Do you think its a virus/hacking on the computer itself? Or just on the email account?

Alright. Ran the antivirus software, it came up with nada.

I changed all the passwords on everything (and set up a reminder in my phone to change them all once a month). Gah, this is so frustrating.

Something like this would be based on your computer. I would def download malware bytes and run that. It will check for malicious software as well as viruses. Its free to download and I run a scan of both anti virus and malware every week. I would also make sure that your IE is not saving your passwords. ( they they auto complete after you type them in one time? ) if they do go into your settings and turn this off. Its never safe to have the computer save these, makes it easier for cookie grabbers to get you passwords. And as Taqroy said make your passwords hard. Random letters using both capitol and non caps at least one number and 7-8 didgits at the small side.

The program I'm running has antivirus and spyware (is that the same thing as malware?). It still didn't find anything.

I checked all my internet explorer settings, and it's not set up to save passwords - it's set up to delete everything nightly. I always have to log in to websites, nothing keeps me logged in.

I went through all my passwords for EVERYTHING, changed every single one to a random number/letter/symbol combination (as the website allows). I plan on doing this monthly, and set up reminders in my phone.

So frustrating.

Honestly I'm more inclined to think that you entered your email/login and password into what looks like a legit site but actually isn't. Signing up for non-legit websites/offers/games/whatever can do that too, especially if all your passwords are the same. I bet you don't have malware or spyware on your computer (but it can't hurt to download a different program and check again).