Malware

[Shayuri]

Last night as I lingered late on the board, a couple of things happened. First, I got a little note from my antivirus that there I'd picked up a naughty program and did I want to quarantine it. Second, almost simultaneously, my browser crashed.

Obviously I'm sure nothing intentionally bad was on this site, but there's the possibility in my mind that the site was used by terrible people to try to spread something malicious.

If you need any more info to investigate I'll help as I can.

 

[renau1g]

I believe [MENTION=85539]Tenchuu[/MENTION] also had some issues. Perhaps he can elaborate.

 

[Tenchuu]

Sorry for the delay.

Yea, I had the same thing happen. I only use firefox for ENWORLD stuff (because it saves all my open windows when I close it). However, I was using McAfee, which turned out to be not as good as your anti-virus. What got partially downloaded was some scareware trojan (Software that generates bogus anti-virus pop-up messages in order to trick you into fully installing the virus and paying them for a "full licensed version"). Just as you described, the internet browser crashed.

I was able to do a hard reboot into safe mode and restore from a previous system restore point to remove the virus. Interestingly, even after I got the virus, I let McAfee run a full scan and it couldn't even detect it. And, the system restore itself broke Mcafee real-time scan (for all the good it has been doing), so i had to chat with tech support so they could fix it.

At the time, I was only at ENWORLD and Wikia, so I suspect a rogue ad on one of those sites was the culprit. I have since disabled shockwave flash in firefox as a precaution, and so far that hasn't beebn a problem for ENWORLD or Wikia.