E-mail hacked?

I have seen many wacky e-mails lately coming from friends. These e-mails, while they may contain sob stories from a "relative" who needs money, also come with no message at all, just a link to some wacky web site. Even Google e-mail's spam filter does not pick up on these! (And, IMHO, Google's spam filter is a good one.)

Here is the contents of an e-mail from a trusted friend (although this came through as a clickable link, I have removed the link in case one of you might accidentally click on it:

http://zukunftsmann.de/images/asern.html

The subject of the e-mail was "free trial", and you can see why some people might be drawn into a note with that subject. So, since it was an e-mail from a trueted friend, I opened it up. When I saw the line (as shown above) that was the ONLY content of the note, I knew, or suspected, that my friend's e-mail had been hacked.

Have you seen any of these? As I said in my opening, I have seen a lot of these lately. Moral of the story, never click on any suspect link in an e-mail, such as the link shown above, even if the e-mail is from a friend. But that is just the beginning of what should be your concern. Has this friend's e-mail been hacked? I'm not sure, but I would proceed and take the steps one would take when one suspects his/her e-mail has been hacked. I would always recommend changing the account password to a robust password, and, as noted in the referenced Kim Komando article below, I would go into the account settings and change the alternate e-mail address, if there is one. 

Yikes! Email was hacked!