A couple of days ago I managed to have my browser (Chrome at the time) hijacked by malware. I'm not sure exactly which site I was on when I picked up the malware, as I had several open and at first I thought it was just a slow internet connection causing the problem. I realised that wasn't the issue when a pop-up message appeared, and rendered the browser unusable. I swapped to a different browser (Microsoft Edge) and installed a malware scanner. The scanner found a few things that my regular virus and malware scanner hadn't caught. However Edge annoyed me because it shows all the ads I'm used to blocking. And then today Edge fell victim to the same thing:
If you ever get one of these, do not ring the number! You will get someone who will want to get remote access to your computer to get rid of this for you, and charge you big dollars. And you can't trust that they aren't actually installing much worse stuff on your computer while they are there, because this is not any official "Support".
I killed off the browser in Task Manager, and re-ran a malware scan:
And then when that was finished, I downloaded Firefox and installed that. Third browser in two days! As well as ad-blocking, I installed a Firefox add-on that has a nice button you use to stop scripts running on websites you visit. Hopefully that will help me avoid future pop-ups. Although I did discover that with scripts disabled I can't look at Bonnie's link-ups, which is a bit of a shame! Might have to re-enable them carefully just for the link-up.
If you are interested, have a look at this page that explains how the "pop-up tech support"scam works, and how to get rid of it.
Tech Support Scam
No comments:
Post a Comment