How do people hijack your email address to make virus-filled spam look like it's coming from you?

I have a website and this is happening to me. Someone is sending viruses around and it has my email in the sender line and when people reply to the spam, it comes back to me. Are they using a program to do this or what?

How do people hijack your email address to make virus-filled spam look like it's coming from you?
Email has no built-in verification of who is sending it. This means that any person can send an email that appears to come from any address. No special tools are needed, just basic knowledge of email headers.
Reply:your website with email link was pharmed for a valid email, and thy got it using pharfming tools and or web crawlers that seek out valid emails on valid domains, similar to freaking in the phone hacking community and body with a semi visible web page on a decent ISP can be pharmed for email addresses.
Reply:You could have a virus that does this. They are programmed to get into your address book or contact list and then send emails to everyone in there. The email contains some message like you found a cool site and they should check it out. There will be a link in the email and when they click on it the virus is downloaded into their computer. This can also be done using attachments like photos. The infecting virus is in the photo attachment.





This happened a few months ago when a Trojan Horse Virus that got on peoples computer due to a weakness in Java Update 6 that allowed the Trojan into some peoples computers. Then the Trojan was programed to attack Yahoo email system. It did what I described above.





Run your anti-virus and anti-spyware scans.





Make sure you have the latest version of Java:





http://www.filehippo.com/download_java_r...
Reply:Part of the problem could be your own website or older PayPal links. A lot of people put their email addresses on their website such as a "Contact Us" page.





Spammers then use bots to go through and look for entries containing an "@" such as jim@mydomain.com and evaluate whether it's a valid email address.





A similar approach is used in bulletin boards and forums where the bots look for user postings.





Even if neither of the above two items are the cause, they can do a dictionary attack against your domain. These programs will take the domain such as "mydomain.com" and the prepend names in front such as adam@mydomain.com, aaron@mydomain.com and so on.





Other spammers will try to query against your mail server for valid addresses.





If you want to know more, you can try the guide below.

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