And Bad News-

[mary_j_59]

I just wanted to tell everyone to be careful. Here is the message I sent to Livejournal support yesterday. It's short, so it's not under a cut.

I thought you should be aware that there is a serious problem with some of the ads you are running. I cannot say which ones, but I had a horrible experience while at work. I went to my livejournal and clicked on a friend's page, and, without my choice or knowledge, malware was loaded onto the library PC. This was at my workplace, and it rendered the computer - a PC we use to send jobs to the printer for our patrons, etc - absolutely unusable. The program that downloaded calls itself "Your PC Protector". It's nasty.

I thought you should know that your site was being used in this way. We users tend to trust the site and don't expect attacks when visiting pages we've viewed before! I'm seriously considering moving my content to another journalling site if Livejournal cannot protect its users from malware attacks like this one.

Thanks. I do hope you can do something to fix this problem.

Comments

[professor-mum.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, my son's Vista pc got it too last wk. Took a very long time before I could get Norton (which I despise) to do it's damn job and quarentine it.

There's a place in hell for the folks who put those malware programs out there.

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Wow! I'm glad Norton worked. Nothing I tried worked on that PC - it seems the thing to do, to keep this from happening again, is to install an ad blocker in your browser. This lovely program hides itself in ads and downloads itself without your even having to click on the infected ad. Talk about nasty!

I'm reluctant to send anyone to hell, even in thought, but really, these are some horrid people. I can't even imagine their mindset.

[professor-mum.livejournal.com]

One thing you have to do is follow the little buggers footprint. Remove it from the program list, type msconfig in the run box and make sure it wasn't added as a start program, dig deep into your temp directories looking for odd files, remove references from regedit. It's a lot of work and the virus folks bet that the average person isn't quite so industrious.