Have you been to Yahoo! or any of their pages in the last few years? If so, you may have been hit with a GOTCHA! That is, you may have been redirected to a bad web page that told you that you were infected with a virus and to call a number.
The Phone Call:
If you called that number, you were assisted by a friendly technician that talked you into letting him (they don’t appear to hire females for some reason) into your computer and you were ‘shown’ how badly your computer was infected.
The “GOTCHA Catch”:
The friendly tech then tried to sell you an assist or support plan, probably for anywhere between $200 and $500 for 1-3 years, depending on what they were pushing on their unsuspecting target on that particular day.
The “Friendly” Tech – No Longer:
If you tell the friendly technician “no” or you hang up on them before you get a chance to disable their remote connection, the “friendly” tech then rears his ugly head and will try to disable your computer in about 5 seconds using a trick in Windows that was not meant to be used this way: you will then be unable to log into your computer the next time you try to use it.
Why this Happened:
This happens because Yahoo! doesn’t police their ad network as well as they should, and bad guys pay for ‘advertisements’ on their ad network that are actually a little time bomb just waiting to go off on your computer, and redirect your browser to their scary web page.
What You Can Do:
This does not just happen on Yahoo! but it does seem to happen the most on their web pages. To protect yourself, you can either not go to Yahoo! web pages, or you can install an ad blocker known as adblockplus available at https://adblockplus.org. It is perfectly safe (as of this writing) and will stop most all advertisements including the bad ones from displaying in your web browser.
The Resolution Catch:
There is one catch – some web pages will not allow you to browse their pages with the ad blocker enabled. To disable it, just click on the new little Stop Sign in your browser, and select “Disable on this site” – then you will be able to browse normally.
If you have been ‘taken’ by these bad guys and can no longer log into your computer, call us at 928-649-3032 and we can help get you back into your computer and we will verify that the bad guys did not leave any back doors open for them to get back in.
We are your Mobile Computer Repair Company in the Verde Valley / Cottonwood / Sedona area – call today!