Questions and Answers

On several occasions over the past few weeks, opening up your site causes a horrific take over of the browser by some service that asserts a virus has been downloaded and that one has to call some phone number immediately. There is no virus, and the “service” that has supposedly detected it is just an ordinary HTML page. However, it takes a few minutes of futzing around to finally kill the browser instance, and additionally, clearing browsing history.

This is the only Web site of the hundreds I visit every month that does this, so apparently your Web hosting provider either has security problems, or more likely, is running ads from a low-quality source.

[USER=12]@Nick[/USER] Bedworth — Yes, and the team over at BoardingArea is working on it, along with a group of malware specialists at The Media Trust. As I understand the issue it has to do with Adobe Flash (Yahoo.com was impacted recently as well), but this has been a tough one to fix.

They are recommending that everyone makes sure Flash and all browsers are up to date in the meantime, but I don’t know much about the problem other than that. It is being worked on though.

Really sorry about the inconvenience, and appreciate your patience!

Thanks Tiffany for checking. To “escape” from the malware, it looks like pressing the “Esc” key and then killing the browser (use the X in the upper right hand corner”) is effective. The malware is in some kind of loop, and without hitting Esc, it isn’t possible to regain control of the browser.

It happened once already today…

[USER=271]@Nicholas Bedworth[/USER] — Do you happen to remember about what time it happened? They’re doing some fancy isolation testing, so the more data we can give the better.

Next time it happens, I’ll note the time. For the first post, it happened about half an hour prior to my post. My office is on Maui, Hawaiian Standard Time, 3 hours behind PDST at this time of year.

FYI. This just happened to me again a couple of minutes ago.

FWIW over on Expert Flyer, a very similar malware attack took place… press Esc to get control, kill browser.

It happens to me atleast once a day when I’m using IE but not on FF (since I have disabled Flash). The trick is to turn off wifi on your laptop temporarily, hit escape and close the browser. If wifi is on, it will continue to loop the page.

Flash is up to date but it still happens.

This just happened to me today as well, btw. The scammy ad immediately redirected me to some scam site which claimed my computer had a virus and to call an 800# (technically an 844 number) for Technical Support to help me remove it.

Having nothing better to do while cleaning the house, I called them. and wasted a good 35+ minutes of their time. They were trying to gain remote access to the computer, initially through LogMeIn via LMI1.com. I kept telling the scammer that the site wasn’t loading…eventually they tried to get me to use Teamviewer. I just kept screwing with him until he eventually gave up and hung up.