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I don't surf weird sites, I disable Java from my browser, I never-ever click links in my e-mail, (even if I know the person who sent it without checking with them first - and even then I'm very selective about it), I'm careful with my downloads and scan every download before opening.



Yeah this is one of those that scares me too because I know you're careful Notes. A friend of mine got hit with this a couple of years ago and I went through hell getting rid of it. I have seen those little popups on various websites trying to tell me I'm infected including Youtube but never one actually on my machine. Sometimes just running my mouse over something on a webpage will open a popup ad without clicking anything so now I really watch where my mouse cursor is going. The other thing that gets me is even big commercial sites like CNET will have several download buttons on the same page as the software I may want to download and it's not immediately clear which download button is the correct one. This is obviously by design to fool people into downloading something they didn't want. So far the stuff is not malicious it's just various advertising but still if I just want to try out a freebie video editor that's all I want not something else so again, I will read the screen carefully before clicking anything.

The other thing is clone your hard drive regularly. I have an esata dock that according to my mobo specs I can boot from so my complete system is cloned and ready to go. The thing there of course is I don't do that every day so the most recent changes would still be lost if my hd died or got irrepairably infected.

Bob

Biab/RB latest build, Win 11 Pro, Ryzen 5 5600 G, 512 Gig SSD, 16 Gigs Ram, Steinberg UR22 MkII, Roland Sonic Cell, Kurzweil PC3, Hammond SK1, Korg PA3XPro, Garritan JABB, Hypercanvas, Sampletank 3, more.