Is your computer a spam-bot? Signs to look for

Your computer may be sending out spam and you don't even know it.
Judging from recent experience with a friend's computer, I have a few
signs to look for to see if your computer has become a spam bot and you
may not even know it!

- Obvious Symptom #1 - Constant "random" rebooting, especially on a high
speed connection: Constant unwarranted rebooting is also a symptom of
your hard drive about to go bad, so install a SMART monitor for your
hard drive to make sure it's not going bad. There are shareware ones,
trialware ones, and Sourceforge has some that are completely free. See
if it has settings that will cause it to sound off an alarm of impending
failure or the possible hiccup before it happens. If it doesn't alert
you before a reboot, then it's possible that your hard drive is OK or
the software doesn't know what it's looking for.

- Symptom #2 - Your friends get less spam when your system is off and
not connected to the net: This happened with a friend's Windows 98
Second Edition desktop. It was really coincidental, but what a
coincidence. We took his "old" system offline, and it was replaced with
Windows XP Home edition. Then we screwed the lid on tight with Spybot
S&D, Comodo Personal Firewall, Ad Aware 2007, and AVG Free. The result
was me getting much less spam than previously, so much less it's not
funny. So if your system is running Win98SE or just "randomly"
rebooting, take it off the net for a few days if you can. Take the drive
out and have someone else look at it with whatever tools they may have.
If your system doesn't reboot while off the net, backup your personal
files, locate all the installs you put on there, and reformat and
reinstall. It's drastic, but it's better than being a spambot.

The rebooting may be the spambot running as a rootkit, so your software
to protect the system may think it's supposed to do that. It's either
downloading new instructions or updating info it will send out, and well
we know Windows 98 needs to restart to recognize the changes. If you
can't find the problem lurking in the hardware, then it's software.

I don't know of any firewall software for Win98SE, but if I do find it,
I will definitely use it. I have a feeling my friend put something on
there without knowing he did (a trojan horse install) so he can't be
blamed at all, but we're still investigating the problem - after all,
the computer still works, we might as well make it work the way it's
supposed to!

I would recommend anyone running Windows 98 SE that's constantly
rebooting without warning to try my suggestions and ask their friends if
they get less spam when their own system is offline. The system file
checker may not see the problem either. This problem is probably not
limited to any one version of Windows either. What I think is happening
is this stuff sits in your computer looking over the data on your hard
drive scanning for email addresses, then spams anything it finds.
Sneaky, ne? Check your running processes and if you find anything that
shouldn't be there, try to find it on your drive, and then end it, but
if you can't find it that way, it's deeply hidden - might as well
reinstall everything.