I use Digg a lot and I enjoy the links, etc sent to me by my friends and fans, but I recently saw a whole new side to it.
I had 'dugg' an article about Eva Peron City: Buenos Aires which collected a lot of reads so I went to Digg to find out if they had come from there. I had a message from someone who was supposedly a fan of mine. I didn't take much notice of the name of the person because I was interested in their link.
The link was to a video which claimed to show everything there is to see in Buenos Aires, so I clicked on it. A box popped up and told me that I needed a plug in to view the video so I clicked the button and allowed it to install.
At this point AVG virus checker started to flash up virus warnings. I also use the Microsoft virus protection system (the one with the shield)and this started to give warning signals.
Then, I got warning sounds and boxes from a virus protection system that I didn't recognise. I thought that I may have installed extra protection and perhaps forgotten about it, so when the programme indicated that I had a serious virus infection, I clicked the button to heal it.
At this point all kinds of warning signals were going off on my laptop.
I investigated the virus which had HREU in the name but no other details and discovered that there are fake virus protection programmes being circulated around the internet and some actually introduce trojan horses to your system.
I am not a computer geek by any means but I did know that I shouldn't close my system down without eradicating these viruses in case they were executable files and they installed on my system when I started it up again. . AVG revealed 28 instances of viruses and Adaware found 40 instances of malware.
My system is checked thoroughly every day and it was clean last night. So, the only conclusion I could come to was that I shouldn't have opened the video link sent to me via Digg. It had disabled my virus protection and allowed viruses into my system.
Video and other file links sent to you via Digg, StumbleUpon and other social networking sites need to be treated with the same caution you exercise when opening your personal email.
Fortunately, I have been able to clean my system up but it has wasted three hours of my day. Be warned.
I closed my system down thinking that I had cleaned it up. When I restarted it I thought everything was normal but when I tried to get onto the internet I was bombarded with adverts for porn sites, gambling and all kinds of things. My browser had been hijacked and I was being redirected to various website.
I discovered that these sites were all being fed to me by something called 'adjuggler'. I tried several Adware removal tools including Adaware but nothing worked. Each time I restarted my computer it was back again. I eventually found something called Superantispyware which removed the problem.
