My brother got hit with a spambot or spammer.

[Anak]

Can anyone explain this to me?

I use gmail, my brother uses comcast.

Last Monday (April Fools day) I received an email from my brother or so I thought so....

It had his correct address, but the subject line was a link to some gardening site, and when you clicked on it my WOT threw up the dark screen and warned me not to go any further.
WOT linked the redirect to a Russian site known for spam and I did not go any further and backed out of there.

We talked about it and he said to just ignore it and delete it.

Now today I received another one, and did not open this one. What would my best course of action be?

I did mail him back in a separate and different email and told him I would wait for his decision, but I figure I had two ways to go.

1.) Report it as spam to gmail, but I didn't want to cause him more headaches, and have his email blacklisted.

2.) Just delete it and ride out the storm of spam emails.

What would my best course of action be?

The sad part about this is our spam had just started to calm down to a trickle, but it is starting to build back up.

 

[Sub Styler]

Get him to change his e-mail password to something more secure using letters and numbers. This should put a stop to it. If he uses e-mail software as opposed to web-based e-mail eg outlook/thunderbird he may have an infection on his local machine. It would be a reccomendation for him to use Malware Bytes to scan his system.

Does he recieve a lot of mailer-deamon delivery failure notifications for e-mails he has not sent? if so his account is being used for spam.

Worst case scenario, he should set up rules to forward all his important mail to a new account and stop using this account, then report as spam.

 

[Britton30]

Steve you brother's PC has the problem and he should do all the anti-crapware scans he can. I get emails like that "from" friends too, of course they don't send them. It's some sort of email spoofing program which gives a familiar addy so the receivers will open them and click the spam link inside.

You can have him run AdwCleaner to see if it will find anything and delete it.

 

[Anak]

Here's a real email from my brother using the same addy:

Spoof email. I have them come into a junk email folder in outlook. I look at them once in a while and blow them out. Do not use any of the links, ever.

Otherwise. blacklist it. It won’t cause me any headaches. You’ll just have blacklisted my address to yourself. Or maybe gmail in general. Email is not high on my list of things to do anyway

It doesn't look like he's too concerned, but I did suggest running MBAM, AdwCleaner and creating a new account.

I didn't get a reply yet about the mail-daemon failures and I told him I'll just delete this one so we could still email, but the next one I will report.