Exploring the issue

Hey guys, I got a good one here for you today. This is one of our Linux Ubuntu virus proof computer as I always say. My customer came in and told me he’s got a virus. He can surf the internet, but he’s got all kinds of popups and stuff. I’m going to show you how to get out of it. This is going to apply probably to Windows as well but for this example. We’re going to go to Chrome. First, you’re going to see his homepage gets hijacked right away with a Mac keeper ad. So if we had a mac you know you might get enticed into downloading this.

You see your computer has a problem to be sent to clean it, and you would download that app which would be even worse. This is how they get a lot of people with computers. How do you know if these are just pages that are popping up? Once you click on the download you’re installing it. If you are on Linux or not it doesn’t really matter. We can click download (you know nothing’s going to happen) but I don’t know what the diagnosis is, but my guess is it’s another pop-up.

The situation is looking bad

This is the probably the worst browser hijack I’ve seen. We downloaded the mac keeper and as you can see it’s a dmg file, so you know if we try to install that nothing’s going to happen. If I go to open up a new page the problem keeps continuing – you get the homepage and then it’s going to redirect back to that. I guess just all kinds of pages are popping up different pages also keep appearing, not just Mackeeper. Just a little while ago something else was on the screen. I guess they take turns and as you can see, every time a page opens up something new comes up. Games a little while ago was one, and that was even worse – it said Windows PC download here to fix your computer.

Now it’s looking for more stuff. Another thing that was interesting about this is that I started the video and have to stop it. Normally what you would do here is you would come over here and go to settings. You get this you scroll down. It would take you to a reset – that’s how you know it’s a simple way to get out of all this stuff. However, what this is doing is it’s redirecting that so you cannot reset your browser. You are supposed to go all the way down and hit reset, so I found a way around it.

Finishing the cleanup

You are going to come up here and you’re going to go to people. Can you see this? (Okay, terrible video but you gotta bear with me – there’s good info in that video.) I have another person here just because I tested it before doing the video, so what you want to do is add a person. So when you add a person it’s going to start off fresh – that hijack is related to that user. Now you’ll see this new browser, with just your know person number two.

It’s not hijacked so you see that now I want to go back a little bit to the Ubuntu part. While I still claim it is virus proof because none of these pop-ups that are saying to download, none of these things can install on your computer, and that’s the bad part about Windows. On Windows, if you get one of these pop-ups that is just a page, when you click it is when you’re actually giving permission for the installation and really get infected. With Linux, you know none of these programs are going to install.

Last comments

What I’m doing here is I’m going to go now to the little three dots, and then we go to settings, then go to these other users and confirm you are on the new user. These are the other two that were there – just remove them and set up your settings again and that should be it. I’m going to close that up so we open up our browser again and it’s clean. So if you get this serious kind of hijack, I just showed you a way to get out of it. It’s going to work for you in Linux.

Again, if you’re on Windows and you click on one of those you might get infect your computer, not just in your browser. And if you’re on a Linux machine, you’re good to go. Thanks for watching.

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