Windows Security..Your Computer is Infected

Fake virus infection Web pages are rampant. By now almost everyone has seen the screen that screams Virus Alert – Warning” text within Edge, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome. The screen is actually a popup window and the technical mechanism behind that fake page is called the iFrame injection attack, a common kind of XSS (cross site scripting) attack. That tech jargon isn't important to us but illustrates that this is not an infection of our binary buddy, but is a bogus webpage. We can be victims of this attack by clicking on a compromised link, ad or even surfing a tricked webpage. Recently the NY Times website was affected by an ad placed by a scammer. Readers of the NYT were getting these fake webpage popups just from being on the NYT webpage.

Unfortunately there is little we as users can do to prevent this attack. It isn't email based or controlled by anything on our PC. There are several things we should do however if we see one of these fake warnings appear on our computer. First and foremost, repeat, first and foremost, do NOT call the phone number that it says we must call. Calling this number will lead to a carefully scripted con job, control of our machine and ultimately their possession of our credit card numbers and removing $399 from our account.

Now that we know it isn't real and just a webpage in our browser, the easiest thing to do is restart the computer. This causes our browser to close, removing the sham warning page. Bear in mind that if we simply put the computer to sleep rather than restarting it the hoax will still be there when the computer wakes up.

If we can't shut down the computer then we need to close the browser. The X in the top right corner may not be accessible so use the mouse to right button click on the time and date in the corner of our computer. This will open a menu, from the menu left button click on Task Manager and from the dialogue box highlight our browser, be it Edge, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Firefox and then click on the button labeled End Task. This will crash and close the browser. If we then open the browser it may attempt to take us back to where we were and the hoax page may appear again. Repeat process and the browser will ask us if we want to restore the previous pages or start fresh. Choose start fresh. Alternatively, if we are fast enough, we can open the browser and on the tab at the top for the counterfeit warning page, click the close X to shut down just that tab.

Finally if all else fails call a local tech. Not only will they remove the offending webpage, they will double check for any other issues and in my case try to educate the user on how to handle this problem the next time it appears. Because it will. Don't fall for a rip-off webpage.

Court Nederveld owns his own computer consulting and fixit service –Bits, Bytes & Chips Computer Services.

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