Near Infection

Last Friday I was on this person's 'puter. I was using it to look up answers for a particular difficult crossword puzzle, I believe I was looking for the last name of some artist who painted one of the 19th century presidents, something as tediously innocuous as that. Not exactly high risk surfing.

Suddenly, this box pops up, WARNING WINDOWS SECURITY HAS DETECTED etc., you know the drill. Click here to repair, yada, yada, yada.

I click on the x to close, the cancel to cancel, but yet it says downloading files!:cry

So I immediately do crtl-alt-del and close it from the TM applications tab, which it says is running.

Reboot, go back on IE, 2nd or 3rd page, and not the same, repeat of above. TM to close again, figure now I got this machine infected, crap!:cry

Anyway, ran cCleaner, all boxes checked. Backed up her data, then ran SAS and Mbam, neither found anything other than a few tracking cookies from POGO games. All back to normal.:drink

Apparently the download was incomplete and ccleaner took care of it:grouphug

Just a note to any newbies reading here. This 'puter had full protection, a relatively experienced user, boringly safe surfing, and still came within a wrong click or perhaps seconds of a potentially major infection.

It's a jungle out there!

 

Yep brandy, a drive by. The idea is to kill the browser from TM with these popups. Click the cancel option - and malware installs/executes. Now Toggle Sys restore as well.

Cheers

 

Yeah there's a lot of crap like that around, trouble is those who get the "You have 1,583 viruses, click here to clean your PC" and it doesn't matter where you click, you get the bug.

I've seen some nasty stuff come down from quite safe sites, I assume it comes from adverts with inbeded junk in them.

While the internet is a wonderful source of information, it's also a dangerous place, electronically and sometimes physically.

Personally I see viruses etc as nothing more than the electronic version of throwing a brick through someones window, cowardly sad lonely people with a chip on their shoulder against the world.

It's a shame something so incredible is so so heavily abused.

 

Got one yesterday! stupid icon on my desktop CLICK HERE TO REMOVE JUNK FILES. ran ccleaner, malware bytes and superantispyware everything seems to be ok

 

Duh, I was sitting right next to the wireless modem, never crossed my mind! confused

Sometimes the simplest solutions, sitting right there is front of you!

Reminds of an episode of NCIS where Abby and McGee are furiously banging away on a keyboard trying to prevent some outside program from attacking their system.

The atmosphere is tense as they are both geeking out with all sorts of complex commands and strategies, trying to but apparently failing to prevent doom.

Suddenly the system goes dead, lights off, no sound. And totally computer illiterate Gibbs walks around into the scene with unplugged power cord in hand!! :-D:-D:-D

 

Big fan of NCIS and at times tend to be the Gibbs type.

 

Sometimes low-tech is all that is needed.

 

I can't tell you how many computers I've been handed where the person tells me that they had a pop up stating their system was infected and all, they ran the 'suggested' software and now the machines doesn't work.

I use FF with avast! and Spybot S&D, and so far have had excellent luck. Even when downloading "Emergency back up copies of music I have purchased at the store", it has saved me from getting things that I don't want.

Funny side note....

If anyone catches Fox News at night, they are always advertising the Bionic Man hearing aid. I tried to go to the site to look at it and FF, SB and avast all almost had a stroke. Apparently all sorts of crap on their site... LOL

No bionic ear for me


~C

 

Huh, I didn't catch what you said? What again? :-D:-D

 

The exact same thing happened to me. Click on the x to close, realized that they expanded the OK button to to extent of the window, immediately did a crtl-alt-del application close and shutdown of computer while also yanking out my internet connection cords from my modem. I still didn't catch it in time. I spent the next eight hours going through the READ & RUN ME FIRST procedures.

Now, when I see these WARNING window pop up, I immediately do a crtl-alt-del shutdown while removing the internet cords from my modem. That seems to prevent any loading of the viruses on my computer.