My Friend Sent Me a Virus!
If you are lucky, your friends won't send you a virus. But if a friend does send you a virus, what will you do?
More than likely the email address of your friend was spoofed. This means that someone decides to make a double dose of trouble by sending out a virus laden email and make it look like someone else sent it. (This can also happen with SPAM.)
However the email may have come from your friend's computer, but was sent without the friend's knowledge. This happens when a computer becomes a zombie computer and part of a 'botnet'.
The best thing to do if your friend sends you a virus is look carefully at the email. Does it have a subject? Usually not, but some of these malware writers are getting better at what they do, so this may not apply.
Is there a message or just a link? Again, this is an indication of malware, but can't be taken for granted.
The plan of action here is to reply to the email and ask your friend what this is about? If the email was sent by your friend they will most likely reply and tell you what 'it's about'. But if the email was sent without your friend's knowledge, then this will be an alert to let them know their computer is infected and to clean it of the infection.
In the last few months there has been a lot of email accounts hacked by scumbags. They use a 'bot' to scan for email addresses and use password stealing programs to access the user's email account and then start sending spam and links to bad sites from the user's account. Sometimes the hacker will change the password and even the secret questions so the user is locked out of his account. They may even put a forward on the account so the real owner does not receive any mail alerting him/her of the hack.
This happens due to the fact that a large percentage of users do not have good passwords on their email accounts.
To prevent this from happening to you, make sure you have a really strong password on your accounts.
For more information check this page in
Computer Help and Discussion.