Hijacking

[Guest The Great G. G. C.]

Many a piece of advice on this subject begins in some such manner as this: "If you are seeing random tech support pop-ups asking you to call a phone number to fix your computer or Apple Mac OS X, then your machine is infected with an adware or a potentially unwanted program.:

 

 

That isn't necessarily the case. The Page you are visiting certainly is infected. But that doesn't mean your computer is.

 

If the malware has disguised itself as being legitimately FROM the page you are visiting then it will slip past your pop-up blocker )assuming you only block third party pop ups) and try and scare you with all kinds of horrible doomsday scenarios such as a dramatic voice saying things like "if you close this webpage your hard drive is HISTORY you must call this number now" and so forth.

 

 

Total BS that.

 

 

I know...I just ran into one of these drive-by scammers while I was looking up some information about Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura of STAR TREK CLASSIC fame). After I was through laughing (and while it was droning on about "deleting my hard drive" and so on I opened my Task Manager. Closed the page (mainly to shut the voice up). Ran Defender (just to check) and rebooted my LAN connection (thus clearing it out).

 

 

Guess what. I'm fine.

 

My PC isn't suffering from anything.

 

And the Hijacker? It ain't around here anymore.

 

 

And how is that possible? Because for YEARS now I have kept Adobe Flash Player set to OFF except for certain specific websites that still require its use. Both Internet Explorer 11 and EDGE allow you to do this.

 

 

All of these hijackers need to be able to access your computer via your active x controls and that means they have to come in either through JAVA or Adobe Flash or some similar program that uses Active X.

 

 

(Actually you're better off not installing JAVA at all. Microsoft stopped including it YEARS ago).

 

 

Keep those off while you browse and you too can afford to laugh at these clowns.

 

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