Bizarre hijack. Upgrade to premium AV?

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tia13
Posts: 130
Joined: November 25th, 2004, 6:20 pm

Bizarre hijack. Upgrade to premium AV?

Post by tia13 »

Hi - sorry sort of long but...

Running Win 7 Professional
AV is Free Avast, auto scans and I run Malwarebytes (free) manually.

Last night on ebay, signed in to add item to watch list. Checked final price on a SOLD item (not mine) and got hijacked thru a bunch of sites, no warnings from Avast, no "get me outta here" from Firefox. The window that began to reload a hundred times (literally) claimed to be from Microsoft and had an audible recording saying to call an 800 number or I won't be able to log on... or something like that. Have NEVER seen anything like it. Gotta say it freaked me out! Everything froze so I manually shut down my computer.

I logged on in Safe Mode, copied the sites from my history and put on disk for future ref. deleted them, checked and cleared any cookies, cache, etc. Reviewed startups, services and finally was able to cautiously get back up, run scans with nothing found. Back online and all seems OK.

Guess I will upgrade. Have not looked into AV for a while, so need suggestions. Avast Premium seems to get high ratings as does bitdefender. Have not added AdBlock yet as I try to keep my PC as uncluttered as possible. it is old and has signs of arthritis :-(

Btw, if anyone is interested in this hijack it loaded 704 sites in a matter of seconds and I cannot find any info on the one that loaded about 700 of them (same).

tiaj
TheVisitor
Posts: 5469
Joined: May 13th, 2012, 10:43 am

Re: Bizarre hijack. Upgrade to premium AV?

Post by TheVisitor »

That is one nasty hijacker, fortunately I've not encountered that in a while now. I believe Firefox & Chrome have somewhat mitigated the number of pop-ups that it creates by being able to stop the progression with a couple of quick attempts at closing the tab or tabs.

Now... I'm not sure any AV is capable of stopping that particular item.

I would 'speculate' that part of the reason you may have encountered the nasty beast is due to your user agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 999.1; Unknown)

What version are of Firefox are you actually running ?
I would strongly suggest you 'reset' your user agent back to the default.
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tia13
Posts: 130
Joined: November 25th, 2004, 6:20 pm

Re: Bizarre hijack. Upgrade to premium AV?

Post by tia13 »

Hi,

yeah, it reminded me of the 90's when windows would just pile up on top of each other! It was crazy! I just looked at the sites it went thru and about the 11th one suddenly has desktop, internet explorer and then my internet provider (not quite like that). Do you know anyone who wants to look at this? I have it all saved very neatly both linked and in plain text. :)

When I mentioned my computer is aging, Firefox is up to date V61.0.2, my UA is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:61.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/61.0. Don't know how to "reset"?

thanks
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DanRaisch
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Joined: September 23rd, 2004, 8:57 pm
Location: Somewhere on the right coast

Re: Bizarre hijack. Upgrade to premium AV?

Post by DanRaisch »

See this article for info on resetting the user agent string -- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ho ... nt-firefox
TheVisitor
Posts: 5469
Joined: May 13th, 2012, 10:43 am

Re: Bizarre hijack. Upgrade to premium AV?

Post by TheVisitor »

DanRaisch wrote:See this article for info on resetting the user agent string -- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ho ... nt-firefox
Dan, unless they have been removed between your 61 and the latest Nightly, those pref's no longer exist...
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DanRaisch
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Joined: September 23rd, 2004, 8:57 pm
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Re: Bizarre hijack. Upgrade to premium AV?

Post by DanRaisch »

Since the browser is still reporting a UA string to the web site, adding a new config entry with the desired entry (the old default value) might work.
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ghot
Posts: 201
Joined: August 10th, 2007, 3:52 pm

Re: Bizarre hijack. Upgrade to premium AV?

Post by ghot »

Bitdefender Internet Security 2019
We the willing, led by the unknowing, have been doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have been doing so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
Brummelchen
Posts: 4480
Joined: March 19th, 2005, 10:51 am

Re: Bizarre hijack. Upgrade to premium AV?

Post by Brummelchen »

Relaying only on av is no good idea. Create a descent security concept, eg adblocker, sandboxie, unchecky and malwarebytes free.

Win7 - Windows defender and mse in that case, rest see above.
the magic number is 51 and you are probably part of it :p
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