Showing posts with label virus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label virus. Show all posts

Monday 28 June 2021

Chrome extensions are useful until they hijack your laptop with charmsearching

 

THERE IS NO CHARM IN CHARM SEARCHING 

A couple of days ago I noticed a very strange thing happening with my Windows 10 laptop. No, not the usual constant updates that make me crave my Chromebook.

No, the problem I had was whenever I searched for anything it was redirecting me to something called charm searching dot com and that would take me to bing where it would come up with the search results and not Google which is my default search engine.

Have you heard of it? Despite its name there's nothing charming about it.  I certainly hadn't been acquainted with it. Then I did my research and what I discovered made me scared to use my laptop.

Charmsearching is the name of a fake search engine and browser hijacker. When your computer becomes infected with this malware your searches are redirected to this fake search engine. There is a chance of your personal data being heavily compromised.

I had to eradicate this dangerous nuisance and fast.

GET OFF MY LAPTOP!

I tried several things - including downloading Combo cleaner - that people who seemed to know what they're talking about suggested. A quick scan took over 4 hours and found absolutely nothing. 

I checked all my browser settings and blocked the search charms website.

But no matter what I tried, including uninstalling and reinstalling Chrinrm

SOLVED - Check your Chrome extensions if you have any👍☺️

Thankfully, then I came across a discussion group and they suggested that chrome-extensions could be the problem. Apparently these extensions which I find useful when they're not screwed up my computer, can work perfectly fine for months and even years only to be corrupted.

Methodically I disabled them all and one at a time I enable each extension and checked to see if I still had charm search. Eventually it was gone. No more redirects when I put in a search.

The culprit in my laptop's case - an extension that takes screenshots that I had been using for months with no trouble. 

If I get any more problems the first place I'll head to is extensions.

Thursday 18 August 2011

Friday 24 June 2011

Trouble at Twitter

I’ve been using Twitter for months now and I love the site. Having to say things in 140 characters or less is great practice for a writer. So too is getting to chat to people you would never get to meet on the non-cyber world.

Something happened to shatter my cosy image of Twitter. I got a message the other day.

It was from a direct message from someone I followed, saying that someone was posting nasty things about me on Twitter. There was a link in the DM that was sent straight to my email. I didn’t click it, because I knew something was wrong.

I am posting a copy of the message below (you'll need to click on it to make it bigger - trust me, this is safe) -


Note - I have blanked out the user names.

I looked on Twitter and couldn’t find any evidence of anyone bad mouthing me. Then I checked out the user who had ‘sent’ me the DM and it was clear from their posts that their account had been hacked.

I now believe the DM was an attempt to get me to click on a link that would put a virus on my computer.

Today, I got another one. This one read - “I can’t believe you posted this http://t.co/nX2Z7oC about me, i am so upset right now.”

Again, notice the inflammatory nature of the message. They want you to think something is up and click on that link without thinking.

How do you deal with this when accounts are being hacked and when on Twitter people post links all the time? I don’t honestly know. Having a good virus checker will help and using in regularly.

Protecting your password and changing it constantly, may also help.

From now on I will be very careful when it comes to Twitter and I hope you will too. Don’t let those spoilers waste it for you.  

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