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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : Any issues with popup windows on the site
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Gizmo Admin Group  Joined: 05/06/2004 Location: AustraliaPosts: 5116 |
Hi Guys Had a member call up, he's having issues with popup advertising when he visits this web site. Other sites he visits are OK. In the end I remote desktop'd into his PC to see it for myself. When he opens the web site, he's bombarded with popup windows and advertising. Dozens of them! The only way to regain control is to shut down the browser using task manager or CTRL/ALT/DEL. He's using IE and Chrome, Chrome is set up to block popups and has adblock installed and running, but still the popup ads get through. Even pages on the site with no adverts on them are triggering the popups! I had a look at the source code of the pages, nothing, clean. I was confident the problem was with his PC and not the site, and asked him to fire up another computer to test. The 2nd computer had no popups, worked fine, the web site behaved as expected. Its a strange one. His antivirus seams to think its OK, but I suspect his browsers have been hijacked. So anyway, has anyone had a similar experience, and what did you eventually find as the problem? Glenn The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is right now. JAQ |
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bigmik Guru  Joined: 20/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 2947 |
Hi Glenn, No I dont see that problem. All clear.. Regards, mick Mick's uMite Stuff can be found >>> HERE (Kindly hosted by Dontronics) <<< |
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| bigmik Guru Joined: 20/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 2947 |
Glenn, Suggest he install firefox (as I am using) and see if it changes... If it is OK then he has been hit by a hijacker or some other malware, these normally attach to your browser but if he installs a fresh firefox I reckon it will work, it doesnt fix his problem but it will help diagnose it. Mick Mick's uMite Stuff can be found >>> HERE (Kindly hosted by Dontronics) <<< |
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| paceman Guru Joined: 07/10/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1329 |
I'm using Firefox (V43.0.1) on an old XP system and not having any trouble Glenn. Greg |
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| DaveC Newbie  Joined: 27/10/2014 Location: AustraliaPosts: 11 |
Glenn, Yes I struck the same situation with pop ups about 2 weeks ago and initially I thought it was your site as it occurred when I fired up my laptop and accessed TBS, but a colleague who has the same laptop/Windows and does not access TBS struck the same problem. Our laptops are both new with Win10 and using Edge. In my case it also infected Firefox as well and in my colleagues case it infected Chrome, and virtually made browsers unuseable and required a lot of effort by some IT people to remove. Apparently it is a bot which lies dormant and suddenly awakens and pulls in all sorts of popups. It slips past Defender without triggering it and it required Malwarebytes and another malware program that I can't recall the name of, to restore the laptop back to a useable condition. The conclusion is that Win10 has some inherent weaknesses that allows this situation to occur as another laptop I have with Win8.1 has never suffered this issue. Dave |
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Herry Senior Member  Joined: 31/05/2014 Location: AustraliaPosts: 261 |
Another reason (and there a few now) why I won't touch Windows 10! Senior?! Whatever it says, I'm a complete and utter beginner... |
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| Gizmo Admin Group Joined: 05/06/2004 Location: AustraliaPosts: 5116 |
The computer in question was Win7, but the symptoms Dave posted sound similar. Glenn The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is right now. JAQ |
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raymond thomson Newbie Joined: 19/09/2013 Location: AustraliaPosts: 36 |
Glenn, Had exactly that problem several weeks ago on my trusty Win7 desktop and most IE screens. My bank cut me off in mid transaction and told me I had a virus. Spybot couldn't find anything and I could not define any background program but there was a lot of CPU activity and pop-ups everywhere on IE. Anyway, finally re-installed Win 7 and no problems since. Raymond |
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Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9584 |
I seem to recall seeing this kind of virus in a client's machine at least a couple of times, and as DaveC mentioned, it was a real pain to remove. It WAS removable, but it was not easy, and the damn thing was self-duplicating, so if you tried to delete the exe files and folder, it would re-copy itself to another location and auto-change the registry. It also hid itself from Task Manager, so you could not kill the process from there either. I remember it for the same reason in that it bombarded the machine with pop-ups. So many of them, that the machine was essentially useless. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| raymond thomson Newbie Joined: 19/09/2013 Location: AustraliaPosts: 36 |
Grogster, I see you found the .exe files. Can you remember how? That is what I could not find this time. In the past when I have found them for other viruses that replicate I have restarted in DOS mode and used Command to search through the directories and delete them. A bit of a trial, dredging the memory banks (mine) for DOS commands, but the only way to root out the malware before it executes in Windows. More fun than Sudoku! R |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9584 |
Hiya. 
I'm not sure if my one was the same virus, but the one I had run in's with, were the fake/rouge anti-virus ones. These mimic a real anti-virus package, and have a complete GUI and everything, but are totally fake, and generate all kinds of annoying messages. They hide themselves from the installed programs list, and if you delete the folder they are in, they reproduce themselves. Obviously, they are sitting somewhere in memory and are aware of where they installed themselves to, so that if they notice that the folder is gone(deleted by user), they re-copy themselves from memory back to the folder tree again - very persistent and annoying kind of rubbish. 
From what I remember, they also hid themselves from Task Manager too, so I guess they were hiding in protected memory somewhere, cos you could not find and kill them that way either. I seem to remember using Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 to scan and kill the virus files BEFORE they can ever load into memory. This is a bootable CD image, and is a customized Linux distro. From what I remember, when you boot it, it will download the latest AV definitions from Kaspersky before scanning. Might be worth a look, although, I have not used this tool for a few years. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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lew247 Guru Joined: 23/12/2015 Location: United KingdomPosts: 1702 |
Nothing at all to do with Windows 10, Just need a DECENT antivirus program installed on the computer. Not one of the freebies like Norton or Mcafee or other free ones - buy a decent one and you'll have few problems Windows 10 is a great operating system, I'#ve been using it for a long time now and love it Yes a few quirks that need getting used to, but no different than using windows 7 after having XP |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9584 |
@ lew247 - I have had all kinds of Mary Hell dealing with AVG-free on Windows 10, and just this weekend, it's latest update caused it to do all kinds of mad things even on my Windows 8 machine(such as saying my license had expired, when I am on the free version which does not need a license). So, AVG is not one I would recommend either at this point, adding to your list of freebie AV softwares. AVG will probably fix the problems, but there are lots and lots of unhappy posts on the AVG forums about AVG issues in W10. Their AVG removal tool even falls over when trying to remove AVG from W10 systems that I have tried it on. It came back with some kind of special error code, but no-one on the AVG forums could get AVG to publicly say what to do to fix it. AVG would just reply with the same script to contact them directly and they would put you in touch with the technical support group - but for some reason they did not want to post the fix publicly so others could do it themselves. Something about needing to install some kind of remote-desktop app, so the AVG people could remote into your machine to fix the issue - odd way to do things, by keeping the actual fix so secret. Anyway, I have defaulted back to the built-in Microsoft Defender for the moment till something else comes along. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| lew247 Guru Joined: 23/12/2015 Location: United KingdomPosts: 1702 |
Microsoft Defender is ok, but I wouldn't use it myself. I use ESET Endpoint Security myself, it's aimed at businesses but I've found it works better than any other I've tried. And If you order it from one of the American sites it's cheaper than the UK sites. |
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| Chris Roper Senior Member Joined: 19/05/2015 Location: South AfricaPosts: 280 |
I no longer trust Microsoft Defender as it fails to flag Windows 10 as Spyware :) Cheers Chris http://caroper.blogspot.com/ |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9584 |
@ lew247 - I have heard of ESET, but I have never used it myself. I probably have seen it on client's machines, I would expect. Might be time to check it out perhaps.... @ Chris Roper - LOL!!!!  Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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