In case you don't want to read that, over 1 million computers are infected. They redirect you through pay per click sites and you are told you have a fake infection and lure you to buy anti-virus stuff.
All you have to do is do 1 google search and if you are infected it will tell you on the top of the search with a yellow box saying you have an infection.
I bet this turns into the big news event of the hour.
Thanks for the tip John. I hadn't heard about it. I did a search and it appears I'm clean.
thanks for the heads-up, john. on the plus side...wouldn't it be great if google turned headhunter and smoked some of these sickos out of hiding? they certainly have the horsepower.
guess i'm clean too. and i generally use yahoo search.
They are pushing warnings when sites are hosting malware, but someone somewhere is sitting up late trying to hack something.
I'm not inclined to buy a piece of software unless it is reviewed here by the peers.
I have begun to use Bing since discovering that Google tracks and stores everything you do. As far as I am concerned, that makes Google malware itself.
Most of the people doing it are in Russia and there is no jurisdiction. The AV2009, the AV2010, then AV2011 virus that came in looking all official and was just an extortion plot to get your money were all from Russia. And the US government can not touch them, and the Russian legal system has nothing in place to make it illegal. Welcome to the wonderful world of IT Security. Even if you track down the emanating IP address, they can't do anything about it.
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I have begun to use Bing since discovering that Google tracks and stores everything you do. As far as I am concerned, that makes Google malware itself.
Our federal Privacy Commissioner (yes, we have one) is prepared to take on Google Inc over concerns about how the firm collects, retains, and uses personal data. (Victoria Times-Colonist, 19 July 2011, Page B1 Business section).
In the article, Eli Pariser, author of the book, "The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You", is quoted as saying, "If I search for something and you search for something right now, at the very same time, we may get very different results". "There are 57 signals that Google looks at to personally tailor your query results. There is no standard Google search anymore. You can't see how different your search results are from anyone else".
A while back, while talking to a friend on the phone, we both typed in the same search phrase, and we got different results displayed by Google. We were beginning to doubt each other.
Yes, Big Brother IS watching us. This is the reason I don't take part in Face Book, or other such "stuff". I made a goof when I first registered here by using my real name.
Glenn
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I have begun to use Bing since discovering that Google tracks and stores everything you do. As far as I am concerned, that makes Google malware itself.
Don't kid yourself that microsoft isn't doing exactly the same thing - they just may not have been caught out as badly yet - YET
Yes, Google is "tailoring" our searches for us based on our internet activity. I read an article about this a couple of months ago that went into great detail.
As one example, the author contacted 2 of his friends with different search habits, and they all typed in the word "Egypt" at the same time and all got entirely different results.
Since I've got my laptop that I haven't really used in the last 4 years, I took it and my sons laptop, and my desktop and typed in a one word search and got 3 totally different sets of results.
So Big Brother is watching us and tailoring the internet to what it thinks we want to find. I'm quite sure Google isn't the only one doing it. Even the ads on the pages we look up are usually tailored to our activity.
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I have begun to use Bing since discovering that Google tracks and stores everything you do. As far as I am concerned, that makes Google malware itself.
The same article stated that they (Google) do the same with their Android phones, tracking and storing your message traffic and locations. I note a very recent court decision that cell phone locations are essentially public information as the user has no expectation of privacy while oot and aboot. Outrageous, IMO, but these are wild and crazy times.
I have no illusions about Big Brother. Telecommunications companies have been in bed with national intelligence since World War I. It started as an old-boy thing but has continued as a matter of policy, at least during time of war. And make no mistake, we are at war now. My solution in general is to lie back and enjoy, but not to give up more than I have to.
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I have begun to use Bing since discovering that Google tracks and stores everything you do. As far as I am concerned, that makes Google malware itself.
+1
You'll get the same results with Bing after a while; adjusted search results.
Clear your history in your browser every so often, and don't remain signed into gmail, google, facebook, etc. log out so public cookies aren't helping keep track of what you do.
Youtube now uses gmail, which means your video watching is on your google cookie. Just practice safe browsing; when you sign in, remember to sign out!
I also have DSL, not cable, because in these parts we get a new IP address every time the modem is rebooted, which is another way you can be easily tracked. Craigslist is big on your IP address, as are some other sites. My wife says the bank notices when our IP changes too and asks for further ID, so sometimes it's a good thing!
About the original post, this incident happened in 2009. It was a coding error of a slash "/" character that went onto Google's servers and was fixed within minutes.
Could this be another one of those so-called news articles that are instead just repackaging of the small amount of original reporting that is left?
Oh, and to make this post music-related, a slash "/" can be used to indicate a bass root.
I switched to Bing a long time ago.
Every virus and fake anti-virus infection I ever got was from a Google search.
Even though everything shows green on my search results I'd get infected.
After 3 times last year I switched to Bing. I like peeking into the pages with Bing.
I hope this isn't going to be bad. Most people still use Google, right?
Wayne,
Interesting, I have DSL and my IP address stays the same.
Maybe I'm the only one in my town that has broadband.
Wayne,
That's why I used the qualifier "in these parts", meaning the area I live in.
Modem has to be shut off for 2 minutes minimum, then the old IP is dropped into the pool of available IP's for the provider and when you get back online you get a new one.
If everybody checks this often we will make Google the most used search engine in the world.
I Google'd boogers and found they have antibiotic properties ! Isn't that special !
Your IP is "leased" to you for 24 hours. DSL and cable will vary, as will how your IP is handled. I can be shut off for 24 hours and power on and have the same IP. At 24 hours and one minute, if my cable modem was powered off when the lease was set to renew, I will get a new IP. I would also get a new IP if their side resets the router I am connected to. Being behind a home network router, my local (LAN) IPs are the same always because I have them hard set in each computer. The outside (WAN) IP that comes from the internet provider is what changes. You, with DSL, would get a different IP if you leave your modem off for a few minutes as rharv said.
The way to test is to visit
www.ipchicken.com or
www.whatismyip.com (and there are many others) and that will show your WAN IP, so IF you have a router in your house sharing your connection, your LAN IPs will be 192.168.1.xxx or 192.168.0.xxx depending on your brand of router. DO not confuse router, which is a device to SHARE a connection and connect networks, with modem, which is a device to MAKE a connection. Many people use modem and router interchangeably, and that is not correct. If you have a home router, that router connects your "network" to your ISPs "network".
Now I am seeing a great deal of emphasis put on whether Google tracks and stores. Understand that log files "track and store", but it's not like someone is sitting there actively scanning what YOU do. That kind of logging is there in case someone disgruntled sax player sends you a death threat and you get a subpoena to track where the message came from. After 3 1/2 years working for an ISP, I learned a lot about that side of things. "Tracking" by itself is nothing nefarious.
Most of the major news services are now picking this up. I'd wager it's not an 'old' post just rerun in the Newspaper. The Post is way up the credibility scale.
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"Tracking" by itself is nothing nefarious.
Of course it isn't. Storing the information indefinitely and sharing or selling it (or having it hacked and stolen, which always happens in the end) is.
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Most of the people doing it are in Russia and there is no jurisdiction....the US government can not touch them, and the Russian legal system has nothing in place to make it illegal. Even if you track down the emanating IP address, they can't do anything about it.
Everything Eddie says here is absolutely true. I wondered for a long time how these crooks could hold you up for an extortion payment in exchange for returning control of your computer. The fact is, that even within Russia, Latvia, and the other places they do business they are constantly changing financial institutions so if someone did want to go after them civilally as oppossed to criminially it is hard to do even that.
One journalist interviewed a list of people who were scammed into paying money, and out of several hundred people that he talked to who used a credit card online to pay the scammers, not one reported the incident to their credit card company. Since they could have challenged the charges as well as taken steps to cancel their cards (they did after all just turn their credit card number, expiration date, and security code over to obvious crooks)it seemed odd to the journalist that they had not reported the fraud to their credit card company. Most of them said that they did not want to admit that they had been so stupid has to fall for the scam.
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Clear your history in your browser every so often, and don't remain signed into gmail, google, facebook, etc. log out so public cookies aren't helping keep track of what you do.
Also, don't forget to delete the ".sol" tracking files created by Adobe Flash.
In addition, I'll pass along a link to an short interesting article I came across this morning.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,775218,00.html
SO much misinformation out there.....
Cookies are stored on your computer. When you visit a site that has a cookie, all the cookie does is remembers any account information you had to set up for that site. The cookie itself is not dangerous and they never have been. The history again is just a browser tool to say you typing. It doesn't "reach out" to anything. Cookies are NOT malicious in any way. Yet the media says so.
The reason you would delete anything like that is to speed your browsing up. If you have 10,000 sites in your history, you make your computer look through 10,000 lines asking "Do I have this? Do I have this? DO I have this?" There is some convenience to the browser remembering but there is a point of diminishing returns.
All your really need to do is download Malwarebytes and let it run. It will block any malicious attempts to reach you, and yes, there are port scanners running that are looking at your computer 24/7. Whether they get IN or not is another story, but some robot port scanner program somewhere is scanning every IP looking for open ports they can exploit. I used to do this when I was young. I know very well how it works. Thus I know how to stop it. And Malwarebytes is the best real time tool right now. Super AntiSpyware is the best "as you run it" tool right now. I still run Norton in the background too. Never had a virus.
Well one good thing about a fake antivirus infection is at least it will pop up and you know you are infected (unless of course you know virtually nothing about computers)
I think that anyone who does online banking in their general surfing computer is asking for trouble. I have a windows 7 partition that is used for that only, means I have to reboot to bank but I think a little bit of inconvenience to stay much safer.
musiclover
Here's what I do when I get a message I don't want to respond to. On windows.
Do a ctrl-alt-del.
Windows Task Manger will pop up. Make sure you click the Applications tab.
Click your browser (IE, FF, Chrome, etc.) and highlight it. There may be multiple instances. Click End Task. Do this repeatedly until all browser instances close.
Works for me when I get a message of any kind I don't like.