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Today, somebody had a problem: they kept seeing a popup on their screen, and obvious scam trying to sell them McAfee anti-virus. Where was this coming from?
In this blogpost, I follow this rabbit hole on down. It starts with "search engine optimization" links and leads to an entire industry of tricks, scams, exploiting popups, trying to infect your machine with viruses, and stealing emails or credit card numbers.
Evidence of the attack first appeared with occasional popups like the following. The popup isn't part of any webpage.
This is obviously a trick. But from where? How did it "get on the machine"?
There's lots of possible answers. But the most obvious answer (to most people), that your machine is infected with a virus, is likely wrong. Viruses are generally silent, doing evil things in the background. When you see something like this, you aren't infected ... yet.
Instead, things popping with warnings is almost entirely due to evil websites. But that's confusing, since this popup doesn't appear within a web page. It's off to one side of the screen, nowhere near the web browser.
Moreover, we spent some time diagnosing this. We restarted the webbrowser in "troubleshooting mode" with all Continue reading