Virus?

[Doofus]

I was just reading a thread, when the whole browser page was replaced with an obvious fake, telling me I have 1 virus, 2 malware and 1 phishing thing. It urged me to 'click this button' or some st, to clean it.

This was the page.

-http://safety.microsoft.com.ttksr.5zp8nhicaovkg4jfhcdwmg.download/ow/en/index.php

Either it's real (which I don't believe), or something at PH towers had been compromised.

Edited by Doofus on Monday 14th May 12:17

[Ultra Sound Guy]

Doofus said:

I was just reading a thread, when the whole browser page was replaced with an obvious fake, telling me I have 1 virus, 2 malware and 1 phishing thing. It urged me to 'click this button' or some st, to clean it.

This was the page.

http://safety.microsoft.com.ttksr.5zp8nhicaovkg4jf...

Either it's real (which I don't believe), or something at PH towers had been compromised.

Probably safer to post a screen shot rather than a potential phishing /scam/virus link!

[Dave Hedgehog]

Doofus said:

I was just reading a thread, when the whole browser page was replaced with an obvious fake, telling me I have 1 virus, 2 malware and 1 phishing thing. It urged me to 'click this button' or some st, to clean it.

This was the page.

http://safety.microsoft.com.ttksr.5zp8nhicaovkg4jf...

Either it's real (which I don't believe), or something at PH towers had been compromised.

total scam

or i need to contact apple and inform them my mac has a windows virus

[Doofus]

I don;t have a screenshot. I wasn't proposing people follow the link; just look at the URL to confirm it's not legit.

[essayer]

Run Malwarebytes to ensure you don’t have any browser plugins etc you don’t know about

[Doofus]

essayer said:

Run Malwarebytes to ensure you don’t have any browser plugins etc you don’t know about

Already (and continually) done

[essayer]

Doofus said:

essayer said:

Run Malwarebytes to ensure you don’t have any browser plugins etc you don’t know about

Already (and continually) done

Probably an ad then, I had this once on another mainstream site, although that was with IE.

Almost impossible to track down the specific ad which caused it unless you were logging at the time

[eybic]

PH seem to have sold their soul to the devil for advertising space so it's likely one of the ads that's being served. It will maybe be responded to by saying the ad team will be spoken to but in reality, they have already sold the ad space so nothing will happen.

[Doofus]

That's what I thought...

[condor]

I posted a thread about this in the computer section, didn't realise that there might be a thread in website feedback about it. Foolishly it seems, I thought PH was a safe site to browse.
Could be argued I wasted 2 hours doing a full scan Sunday and a further 2 hours this morning. I'm just pleased that I now know PH is the culprit via a dodgy ad it's allowed.

[AlexRS2782]

Definitely a dodgy ad that's been fed through. The last time i used this site minus an adblocker active my antivirus went mad telling me it was blocking numerous connections from a script that was attempting to gain access to my laptop to mine bitcoins. Checked the origin in the antivirus and lo & behold it was tied to one of the banner adverts that was being served by PH's preferred provider, that contained a malicious script

There was also this thread recently - https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&... - whereby another user pointed out PH / HM appeared to be allowing adverts through containing explicit / sexual content.

Now using Chrome with a decent adblocker and PH is once again free from all the crappy / clickbait adverts.

[Shuvi McTupya]

[Doofus]

Shuvi McTupya said:

Yep, that's the one

[Shuvi McTupya]

Doofus said:

Yep, that's the one

That just popped up for me so i installed adblocker. I then loaded PH, navigated to this thread and posted here and in one other thread. Adblock has blocked 60 items!

[Doofus]

TBH, PH is littered with ste adverts and adverts for ste these days.

It is a coincidence that this began soon after the secret/not secret announcement that Haymarket have decided to stop giving a toss about the forums? Hmmmm...

[Shuvi McTupya]

possibly..

i have just noticed that some ads are getting through adblocker, such as the large 'sponsored content' bks at the bottom of every page..

[Unexpected Item In The Bagging Area]

As per the later pages of this https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&... thread, if you browse via Brave you’ll see no adverts.

[trickywoo]

Doofus said:

Shuvi McTupya said:

Yep, that's the one

This one just came up for me too.

[Tom Logan]

I have Ublock and Ghostery on Firefox and I've never seen an advert on this site, all I get is an occasional blank box on the right hand side of a page, if the ads weren't so intrusive I wouldn't feel the need to run adblockers.

The expression 'hoist by your own petard' springs to mind.

[Loyly]

Part of the problem is the st, low-rent advertisers that Haymarket uses. No serious advertiser with a decent product would want to work with a bent bunch of jokers like Haymarket or post their adverts on an increasingly tatty looking website like Pistonheads. So instead we get these cheap spam adverts, loaded with dodgy scripts and viruses.

I've had fewer issues with the site since I started using Brave to browse.