I just got my cable internet turned back on.

I got a call at work today from my isp security dept.They shut my cable off this morning.Apparently my computer emailed 34 virus laden emails to a small local college campus and crashed their server.

After a major hardware change(athlon xp to athlon 64,cheap mobo to msi k8n neo4 platinum)all of my distros and winxp freaked out and would not boot so I formatted both hds sunday and the only os I have in my box now is mandriva 2006 x64.

The strange thing is I've never emailed anyone with an @college campus addy.Ever.

Evidently linux isnt as secure out of the box as I thought.

I am a noob to linux.I run shorewall on auto blacklist.What other AV software/firewall should I get?

I really dont think it was my computer that did that but my isp seemed pretty sure of it?Anybody have any theories?I would love to hear them.

Thanks

It is highly unlikely that it was your computer sending this emails, unless you were running an open SMTP relay. Is sendmail running on your box?

I dont think its running.Where do I look to see?

Use 'ps -ef' to see what processes are running.

No its not running.

Is a virus scanner or rtkhunter necessary with linux?

rkhunter or chkrootkit can be useful to help make sure you do not have a rootkit on your system, but I doubt that you do.