Watch out for Evantageinbe.club. With your naive permission it resets the popup blocker settings in your browser and starts push-serving ads in a very annoying fashion. It tries to look like it's part of your browser.

But then we never click on any of these things, do we? Seems some people in my household do....

Over the years I have found Malwarebytes to be very effective at getting onto this stuff; It is not unusual some days to get a string of Virus & Malware. Its absolutely amazing, the number of pathetic people who have no life, nor the ambition to go out & get one.

Email received today, addressed to me by name:

QUOTE: My name is Ace Crawford and I represent Victorum Corporation, an established, alternative Health company that specialises in cultivating pure Cannabis and Hemp (CBD/CBG/CBN products) for individuals looking to finally take control of their health.

Would be interesting to know specifically where this American mob, looking for investors, sourced my name and email address, but I'm pretty sue they wouldn't be willing to tell me.

The answer to that question would be "commercial in confidence" and they probably wouldn't bother responding. That's okay though, it just gives the spammee more encouragement to tell them to GGF. Anyone calling themselves Ace is probably suffering from a bad case of anal retentiveness.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

Well one way is that particular nasty, that's one of the things it does.

I cleaned up Rosemary's machine, removed 45 instances of spyware. After 1 hour's use, 10 of them were back. Blocked it off completely in Chrome (the browser she likes to use) so let's see how it goes now.

The worst case I was actually asked to see if I could sort out, was getting back into the early XP days. Part of the issue was due to oldies not au fait with computers & the computer had no virus, or other protection; yet they were using it for internet banking.

Grand rug rat had loaded some sort of wow program claiming that the computer was full of bugs: Naturally it was the bug and that cost $4K as it got into the accounts. Which is one non-associated reason for the credit card having a withdrawal limit. This thing of course, could not be unloaded, but fortunately Malwarebytes managed to get it out.

The first pass with it (noting no prior protection) cleared 2000 bugs. A former neighbour was working in Education in Kalimantan & the student pastime was writing virus forms.

In experience Malwarebytes sure is the best Anti-virus piece of software out there but it wont catch absolutely everything. I know a guy who ran a computer store and one night not too long ago a trojan virus was sent to his mail and got into his server and spread like wildfire to a few other machines connected to his network. a nasty virus for sure. He lost the last 12 months of work he didn't back up. His shop isn't open anymore although the trojan wasn't the virus which finished him off, rather the Chinese one.

Always back up your data.

I've had good experience with Spybot S&D, it's unobtrusive and assumes you know what you are doing.

I've used Malwarebytes for years and found it very effective.
I use the free version and run it every week or so.
I also use an adblocker extension on my browser which has an added benefit of stopping all ads on youtube.
For virus protection I use Avast and always wait until it just about expires as it then offers renewal at a much reduced rate.
You just have to remember to turn off auto renewal each time you renew (been caught once!).
Luckily my kids are grown and flown the coop so no nasty sites visited.

I have been reading all these posts . I seldom use or even turn on the computer. However I use a few different tablets. This IPad 2 is so old it does not suport internet banking anymore. I have a Samsung S5 mini smart phone and a cheap and nasty Alcatel telstra tablet these two are the ones I use for paying stuff how exposed am I? I am totally Nieve and stupid when it comes to this stuff it just freaks me right out. As far as I know these don't have any antivirus software and have no idea how to put any on if needed . I know some will read this in disbelief I basically cannot handle this century. I should have been born the the 1800's . I am also cash strapped at the moment and can't afford all this fancy stuff. Any suggestions?
As always Kind Regards Jim.

Using old versions of operating systems, although familiar and convenient, actually exposes you to the jerks out there. More recent versions of operating systems and web browsers (usually) have built in defences against the well known loopholes in security exploited by scumbag virus creators.

As for anti-virus there are some good free ones out there. I use Avast which has both a free and paid for versions. (I use the paid for version because I believe in supporting development of AV tools). Avast has saved me many times.

Email fraud and virus delivery is still quite prevalent. The golden rule there is: NEVER open an attachment in a message from a sender that you don't know. Simply delete the whole message.

And think first before opening an attachment from what looks to be a legitimate sender such as Australia Post. One of the worst bitcoin ransom viruses was spread by what people thought were messages from Australia Post.

In summary, you need to be alert and vigilant and have insurance in the form of AV and firewall, but you can still be fooled because these scumbags are forever working on new ways to avoid the existing defences.

As the sergeant used to say in Hill Street Blues: Let's be careful out there.

The golden rule there is: NEVER open an attachment in a message from a sender that you don't know. Simply delete the whole message.

I've been going one better for years now, especially with those messages with the headline RE: <subject matter here>. It's an automatic bin job without opening if I fail to recall sending a message in the first place. As I send very few non work related e-mails, remembering what I do send is fairly easy.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...