Go Where You Want, Not Where You Think You Are!

The Internet is an amazing resource. It provides information, shopping, entertainment, how-to, recipes and access to software to accomplish almost any task. There is a dark side as well that we can avoid with just some simple common sense actions.

Most folks get in trouble because they don’t differentiate between a search and a website address. The easiest way to tell if we are performing a search is after we type in what we think is the name of the site we are trying to find, a page with a list of possible results appears. If we actually typed in an address, the resulting webpage will be the company we wanted to see. Example: if we use the search field and type in hp support we see a list of websites that have the words hp and support. But only one of them is going to actually be HP.com. If we type www.hp.com in the URL (Universal Resource Locator) usually at the very top of our web browser (not in a search field) we will see the HP website appear instead of a list of possibilities. In this exercise, the safe way to get to HP support is to type www.hp.com in the URL and then on the HP page click on the Support tab and then find Contact Us. Now we are actually talking to HP. This holds true for any company we are trying to find.

This week I had my own little goof, I typed way to quickly outlok.com instead of outlook.com. Immediately a warning popped up and sirens went off telling me my computer had been infected by the Zeus Trojan virus and unless I called Microsoft at the number on the screen I would lose all my data and the hard drive would be burned to a crisp.

Interestingly, the warning was a webpage from the Internet and did not originate from my binary buddy. The Zeus Trojan virus is a 2003 virus, resurrected in 2013 and doesn’t warn the user that it is on the PC. Any antivirus program is familiar with and easily removes the virus.  It certainly doesn’t infect a computer and then tell us that we should call Microsoft to have them remove it. The bogus webpage does prevent us from closing our browser or more accurately it compels us to force the browser closed. Our browsers try to be helpful and bring us right back to the same website we were at when the browser was closed which means we come right back to the goofy warning page. Probably the easiest way to close the browser is to restart the computer. We can also hit the CTRL+ALT+Delete keys on our keyboard, open up Task Manager, then find and End Task any browser windows open. Finally, run a full antivirus scan or use Malwarebytes to scan the computer. we can also type in the address bar http://support.kaspersky.com/viruses/utility# (not the search bar) and follow the instructions to download TDSSkiller from Kaspersky. If we have a Trojan virus this will find it.

Finally, given a choice between Rashid (pardon me Mark) from Pakistan or a local tech, choose local.

Court Nederveld owns his own computer consulting and fixit service –Bits, Bytes & Chips Computer Services. He makes house calls in Punta Gorda/Port Charlotte, FL! You can reach him at adakeep@hotmail.com