Virus on Basil?
I was going through the Basil threads when suddenly, my window redirected. It then went on a white screen, and my anti-virus alerts me of a trojan. Has this happened to anyone else?
April 7, 2011
Virus on Basil?
I was going through the Basil threads when suddenly, my window redirected. It then went on a white screen, and my anti-virus alerts me of a trojan. Has this happened to anyone else?
2 Comments • Newest first
Thanks I was just wondering. My anti-virus got rid of it quickly, plus I scanned it a few times.
Yes. This can happen on ANY site that has ADVERTISING on it.
Sites like Basilmarket (and many, many others) get the ads from a central ad server like Google, and you never know what ad may pop on any site
Unfortunately some of these ads are infected with trojans and if you're looking at a site when one of them pops up your computer may react like yours did, or display something like a fake anti-virus scan. Usually there will be no permanent effect unless you actually click on something in the ad. If that happens, it can download a real trojan to your computer which can do all sorts of evil things.
You should run a full scan with your anti-virus immediately when anything like this happens, to be sure you catch anything that's infected your system.
I also use "Malwarebytes Anti-Malware" scanner to help catch these things in additon to my normal anti-virus because Malwarebytes is specially optimized to find spyware like this. It's free and easy to use.
If you'd like to prevent things like this from happening in the future, it's best to use an AD BLOCKER for your web browser so the ads never have a chance to infect your computer. I use "AdBlock Plus" for Firefox on mine and never even see the ads any more. As an added bonus, the pages load a lot faster.
But it's important to note, it's not Basilmarket's fault, it's the ads that are separate from Basil that are doing this.