emails to Canadian Pharmacy

[gspto52]

I have recently gotten emails from 2 different people in different parts of the country. I know both of these people so receiving an email was not questioned. Emails have been sent with no subject line and sent to, I assume, everyone in their address book. Each email only contained a clickable link in the body of the email - nothing else.

The first one sent caught me off guard & I did the bad thing - I clicked on the link. It brought me to Canadian Pharmacy. I immediately ran my virus scan & found nothing. I then ran Malwarebytes and it found the following:

Registry Keys Infected:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\Stats\{1d4db7d2-6ec9-47a3-bd87-1e41684e07bb} (Adware.MyWebSearch) -> Quarantined and deleted successfully.

I am not sure if this was in any way connected to the email link. But was wondering if anyone knows what may be causing the emails to be sent so I can forward any info to my friends to have them check out on their computers. One person has actually sent me another email, same format but with an entirely different link so I know she hasn't been able to contain whatever has taken over her email program.

Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

[Maurice Naggar]

Howdy,

I'd suggest you do a FULL scan with MBAM (first, making sure to do an Update run).

Then do a full scan at one or two of the online scanners

Kaspersky Webscan Online Virus Scanner

ESET Online Scanner

Panda ActiveScan

BitDefender Quickscan

Trend Micro Housecall

F-Secure Online Scanner

Note that your email address was harvested somewhere. And also note that some spam is so "clever" as to make it appear that it originated from one of your contacts (even though it originated on a 'bot' elsewhere).

Run MBAM & one of the online checks, plus a full scan with your antivirus ( as you have done).

Later on, change the password to your email account.