Tuesday, January 26, 2016

What to do when you land on a Malicious website [TIP]


It is becoming more common. You are clicking through various websites and all of a sudden you come across an attempted computer hyjacking which you noticed was a web page that gave you no option to do anything (but call that number) which you DO NOT want to do!  The website will look something like these images: 

Actually the fix is as simple as closing the chrome browser, which you can't do by clicking on the X in the upper right. The only way to do it is to RIGHT CLICK on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen and choose TASK MANAGER. Then once the task manager opens you simply END TASK of the Chrome browser. You can also do the Microsoft Three Finger Salute which is ctrl-alt-del and then choose TASK MANAGER.  Once this is done you can then open the Chrome browser again. You will be greeted with "do you want to restore?" which you DO NOT want to do as it will land you back to the same website.

What has happened is you had landed on a website that has malicious content, as you witnessed by the fact that you were locked out of your computer and they wanted you to call the number so that they could convince you to allow them to connect to your computer and then tell you that you were "seriously infected" and they would fix this and then charge you for it.. extortion is another word for it!

What Google is doing about this, is when you land on any website, the browser actually scans each and every other web link on that page for these sorts of things. Unfortunately when it does this scan, if there is such a site, it will trigger it as if you actually landed on it, which in a way is the same thing as landing on it.  But because you didn't actually land on it, you still have the ability to 'end task' which is something you wouldn't be able to do if you actually had landed on the malicious site.   Normally if you go to a website by entering the wrong information in the URL, google chrome will put up a red page which will look something like this:


With the situation that you see above, you should be able to just back out of it or enter a new web url without your mouse freezing and not being able to close the website.

In any case if you do come across this sort of thing and can't do anything just contact me and I will take care of it for you.