Be careful when searching sites. Last week I googled the phrase faroese shawls. One of the sites I visited had spyware attached to it. I did not know it until my husband turned the laptop on the next morning. There it was on the monitor when it booted up. He has had a lot of trouble etc., trying not to lose stuff and it has corrupted other stuff.
Funny thing though: I was using Google when this happened, but now Google will not let us use its’ site because it detects that we have this problem on our laptop. Go figure.
i’ve had stuff like that happen as well, i tend to get patterns fro mlinks on here that you guys have found or from ravelry. i figer that is a little safer than just a google search. im useless at things like that so tend to air on the side of saftey.
thanks for the warning though i dodnt know either until i found out the hard way
Do you have a decent firewall on your computer? We update our frequently.
I think most Linux users would tell you that they never have that type of problem, as soon as I get my own computer, that I don’t have to share with DH, I’ll be switching over to Linux.
But I’ve got to tell you that I’ve never heard of Google being the problem, but then there are a lot of things I’ve never heard of.
I googled an article about the mistake in the .42 flag stamps and got a USA Today article. Unfortunately the USA Today link contained some kind of malware. I checked everything. It looked legit. The USA Today article had no funny additions to the link or anything. It pulled up the article just fine, but when I tried to send the link to my BF it came up as spam!!! Then my antivirus software (NOD32) warned me that there was something on my computer. Thankfully between NOD32 and ADware I think it was destroyed. I haven’t had any problems since that day and then only for a few moments. It really sucked though!!!
I don’t think Google has the issue, it is most often the advertisments that come from other sites. Virus authors have found a securty gap in this type of “third-party” advertising. To make it easy to follow the pattern, I’ll give it in an example using google, double-click, and Mr. Mal-ware.
Mr. Mal-ware creates a simple but eye catching ad and contracts with someone like Double-click to make it accessible to anyone who asks for the ad. This ad host will accept updated ads from Mr. Mal-ware as long as he pays his bill. Next Mr. Mal-Ware buys advertising space from various sites just like Google and request that they pull the latest ad version from Double-Click.
So far, both Double-Click and Google have checked the ad for safety and/or content lables and appoved the sale(transaction). After the ad begins appearing, Mr. Mal-Ware modifies the ad to include malicious software and neither Double-click nor Google have the resources to continually review advertisements so it is unknown to them that their service is being used to spread mal-ware.
Best practice, maintain up-to-date Internet security software, such as anti-virus, personal firewall, and anti-spyware/anti-adware software. Send an email to the site where you believe you picked up the mal-ware with time of day, date, and other details that may help identify the ad that delivered the bad-package to your electronic doorstep.
I have had this experience at least twice, and the security software didn’t prevent the infection but was able to recognize it and remove it later.
Come to think of it, both time it was a google search that led me to either a link to a bad (malicious) site or an image/ad that carried a trojan horse.
Mr. Mal-ware is a fictional name and only exist in the mind of this author.
I enjoy Knitting help dot com and and this forum, though I crochet more than knit.
I had a Dell techie tell me that if you click on the red X on the pop ups, you are most likely installing adware or malicious bugs of some sort.
He said to open up task manager and close it from there. So that is what I do for that problem and it seemed to help.
I understand it’s not like your problem, but just a tip for the future.
