Any Possibility of Weird Malware?

[papayaninja]

This afternoon I visited this site on my brother's computer and IE7 seemed to close with a window in the bottom right of my screen saying something about my computer not being protected, etc... It said I should install a program, whose name I know forget, and was obviously pretty sketchy. The pop-up window had a cancel button, which I clicked and the IE window was restored, but instead of iLounge the page for the software had loaded. I hit back and iLounge worked after that. I figured my brother who isn't the brightest bulb in the socket when it comes to computers must have downloaded something dumb, so I ran McAfee and left it alone. Now on my computer, this time in Firefox (most recent update of FF2), the same exact thing happened, but it suggested a different piece of software and redirected me to a new site, but it was pretty clearly the same thing.

Since both occurred when clicking a link on the iLounge homepage I was wondering if it could be something on your end? I'll run a virus scan on my PC too, but if it was on your end I thought I'd let you know...

edit: A few things. I couldn't duplicate it by closing and reopening Firefox. The second thing is that it might have been in FF on my brother's pc also. Three is that both times I also had just created a Digg tab but the page that went to the weird one was always the iLounge page. It probably has nothing to do with iLounge, but it's a bummer no matter what.

 

[Galley]

The same thing just happened to me in Safari on my Mac.

 

[Germansuplex]

I'm pretty sure it's site-related and not on your individual computer. It happened to me both at home and at work.

 

[studogvetmed]

Was it PC optimizer? It happened to me in firefox on Mac yesterday....

I know PC optimizer has been suggested as a malware site, but.... Not sure how it all went. When it happened to me, I force quit. It was very strange.

Edit update: I just came here and there was an odd extra loading message below in my firefox.

"transferring data from traveltray.com" I got redirected to a malware shredder or something of the like....

Very odd.

I'm not usually too paranoid about these things, but I may have to download clamX or whatever for my mac.... I mean I try not to even click on the cancel button, but. Oh well.

 

[Jesse Hollington]

I've had the same thing happen to me a couple of times now as well.

We're looking into it. It's very likely coming through in one of the third-party advertising banner links, since there's nothing in the site itself that would trigger this.

 

[honeybee1236]

I've had the same thing happen to me yesterday and today while using Safari but not while using Camino on my Mac.

 

[studogvetmed]

Once you find the guilty advertiser, Make sure they get 30 whips with frayed iPod headphone wires!

 

[bobb-mini]

Just to be safe, when u folk see sumthing like that, DON'T CLICK ANYTHING ON IT. Kill it via the task manager or whatever u have in Macs. Better safe than sorry.

 

[papayaninja]

It was PC Optimizer or something similar the first time. Bad advertiser! Bad!

I think thirty whips is going too easy. At least 45 please.

 

[jbforever05]

I just hit cancel and closed the browser, then reloaded and ilounge worked fine. This thing isn't going to cause any problems for my PC is it?

 

[Jesse Hollington]

We've managed to track it down, and the offending ads have been removed.

The issue was that one of the advertisers themselves, Yourmusic.com appears to have been hacked/compromised. These compromised ads have also recently appeared on other legitimate sites such as Yahoo.

In this particular scenario, the scripts themselves seem to be relatively harmless -- they're completely fake.

If you hit "Cancel" you should not have any issues at all.

On the other hand, even if you accepted the scan, what they're really trying to do is to convince you to pay money for their full anti-spyware product by "detecting" some "bad stuff" running on your computer. This is all done through a fake web page script that does little more than inject a couple of inert registry entries that are later picked up and cleaned out by their paid software. It's a complete scam, but no actual damage seems to be done to your system.

Oh, and for Mac users, it doesn't do anything more than run a web page that makes it look like you're infected. Of course, the first clue there might be the references to a C:\Program Files folder....

(As an aside to how these types of things prey on the inexperienced computer users, I recently visited an aunt's place to clean up her computer that was running very slowly and having all sorts of problems.... It turns out the real issue was that she had responded to approximately fifteen of these ads, and had all of these fake anti-spyware scanners running in the background out of fear that Windows was telling her that her computer was infected all the time, so she needed to install these software packages that were being recommended to protect herself). The Add/Remove programs window had more so-called anti-virus/anti-spyware programs than actual legitimate software :shake: ).

 

[honeybee1236]

Thanks Jesse for solving the problem.

 

[Galley]

I laugh at their pitiful attempts to harm my system!