Email document problem

Budgie

I received an email from my accountant this morning with an clickable document contained within the body of the message. This isn’t particularly unusual so I clicked it and it took me to a webpage thanking me for signing the document without any further info. Obviously, I was immediately doubtful and emailed my accountant who has replied saying he hadn’t sent it and it had been sent to everyone on his contact list. Presumably I now have an infected PC. Is there any way I can find out what it is? It wasn’t detected by AVG. A PITA for sure. 

The accountant has since emailed confirming and asking everyone to just delete the email and apologies etc... Shame they can’t keep their system more secure!

Any advice gratefully received.

cheers

Phil_aka_Pip

Oh dear.

Oh dear oh dear ...

Nitefly

Try Spybot?  That should identify and quarantine it.

Budgie

Phil_aka_Pip said:

Oh dear.

Oh dear oh dear ...

Not following you?

Budgie

Nitefly said:

Try Spybot?  That should identify and quarantine it.

I’ll check it out. Thanks.

It’s annoying as I never open links etc unless it’s from a trusted source and not out of the ordinary, which this wasn’t.

Phil_aka_Pip

Budgie said:

Phil_aka_Pip said:

Oh dear.

Oh dear oh dear ...

Not following you?

You could have given away all your bank PINs, your passwords and everything else by now. That's how they get you, the bastards!

darthed1981

@Budgie first off don't panic, a lot of the nasties exploit vulnerabilities patched many years ago, so you may have contracted nothing (you install all your windows updates right)?

Run a full AV scan and also download Malwarebytes and run a scan with that.  You can try one with Windows Defender as well if you have win 10.  Don't type in your credit card number until you are sure, dont connect your backup drive until you are sure (just in case you have picked up a cryptolocker style worm).  If none of those find anything except tracking cookies, then it isn't THAT bad.

More of a worry, analyse what information you just provided, did you type anything in?  What's your exposure?  Did you reveal any personal information that could be used for identity theft?  If not, then again, breathe easier.

Probably all you have done is validated your email with a spam database, annoying but not devastating.

As always (for me): -

- Install all your Windows updates

- Run an up-to-date anti-virus (Windows Defender built into Windows 10 is decent if you have nothing else).

- Keep at least one and ideally two proper backups of anything you value.

- Be careful what you click on.

As long as you have obeyed rules 1 to 3, you hopefully will be OK having broken rule 4!

Hope it works out OK, good luck

Budgie

darthed1981 said:

@Budgie first off don't panic, a lot of the nasties exploit vulnerabilities patched many years ago, so you may have contracted nothing (you install all your windows updates right)?

Run a full AV scan and also download Malwarebytes and run a scan with that.  You can try one with Windows Defender as well if you have win 10.  Don't type in your credit card number until you are sure, dont connect your backup drive until you are sure (just in case you have picked up a cryptolocker style worm).  If none of those find anything except tracking cookies, then it isn't THAT bad.

More of a worry, analyse what information you just provided, did you type anything in?  What's your exposure?  Did you reveal any personal information that could be used for identity theft?  If not, then again, breathe easier.

Probably all you have done is validated your email with a spam database, annoying but not devastating.

As always (for me): -

- Install all your Windows updates

- Run an up-to-date anti-virus (Windows Defender built into Windows 10 is decent if you have nothing else).

- Keep at least one and ideally two proper backups of anything you value.

- Be careful what you click on.

As long as you have obeyed rules 1 to 3, you hopefully will be OK having broken rule 4!

Hope it works out OK, good luck

Thanks @darthed1981 ;

Windows (10) is up to date and I ran AVG and Malwarebytes (both free versions) this morning and neither found anything.

I didn't enter any info at all luckily. It was a DocuSign link with the logo and looked legit but when clicked, it just went to a webpage that thanked me for signing the document. I realised that it was probably a spoof page and closed the page.

I'll make some back ups of important files just in case.

notanon

Google the link. It doesn't take long before somebody posts information about malicious emails and links.