I have received an email which appears to have a picture (html?) that is an active link to some sort of malware. Someone at work received it and forwarded it to me to see what it leads to for testing or analysis purposes. I can forward the email but it contains somewhat sensitive email addresses as it was forwarded from a batch of email addresses in a book. Any ideas? Please PM if needed. Thanks
It is usually just best to delete it. Don't open it. Don't forward it. More than likely, if truly malicious, the bad guy spoofed any identifying information anyway so any tracing back would lead to a dead end. Beyond that, there are methods to send suspected emails to Microsoft, Symantec/Norton, McAfee and the others, but these methods typically are to be used when the suspected email successfully made it past their filters and scanners. For example, this article tells Office 365 and Exchange Online Protection customers how to submit those emails that made past those Microsoft filters. McAfee has similar guidelines for suspected spam or phishing samples that made it past McAfee security products. So what really should happen is that "someone at work" should have forwarded it to their IT people, not you. Oh, and normally links don't "go to" malware. Typically malicious links "contain" malware, or they send you to a phishing site or something similar.
It was actually a fairly simple question, not something that necessarily needed a sermon for a response. But thanks anyway.
i use mailwasher and when marked as spam then its contributed back into the anti spam network. thats all here, i dont care any longer of such mails after deleting it. many email provider take care of such spam list, i can see it when exploring my (online) spam folder where mails get sorted while they arrived here in the beginning of their appearance.
If there is a link to malware in email you can just copy paste link on Virustotal or submit it to other AV vendors for their analysis. You don't need to send whole email if only link leads to suspicious site.
"Why is the sky blue is simple" question. Does that mean the answer is simple? It was not a sermon. But good to know you are so grateful when someone offers their spare time to help you. I do too. In fact, I'm a MailWasher Pro beta tester. Great program. And I report suspected spam to SpamCop, the FTC, and PhishTank. But the problem in this case is the suspect email was not originally sent to the OP but forwarded to him by a friend/coworker, and therefore, not spam. I don't see where MW will help now. In the future, MWP might help the original recipient but I note MailWasher is a "spam" filter/blocker. The OP asked about an embedded link in an image that goes to malware. That to me is something browser security, email client security and/or their anti-malware solution should address.
