Recently, I talked about social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. This month I would like to offer a cautionary tale and warning that can allow you to participate in this exciting new social media without your computer contracting a “social disease”.
One fine day I was enjoying myself, surfing the net, sending tweets (twitter messages) and building my friends and followers lists. As a result, I began to receive e-mails from some of the other twitter users. The emails had interesting and provocative topics about increasing search engine optimization (SEO) and building your business on the web. Because, I own a website and do most of my research from my computer, I started reading some of the advertisements that were sent to me. The problem was the emails were outside of the safe confines of Twitter, and they were from sources I was not familiar with. ( I should have heeded the warning I give to my grandchildren, “Stranger / Danger!”) I went to read more about a product and it attached keyword launch advertisements to my computer. Suddenly, PLOP right on my computer, I had contracted not the swine flu but a spyware/adware virus.As I was working on my website, www.discovertheregion.com I would see key words in GREEN with an underline. As I would scroll over the word, a pop up advertising box with GAMEVANCE Advertising would entice me to click and go to another page of advertising. I was confused. This was not a feature I wanted on my computer.
I contacted my webmaster Rick and asked, “What is going on?” He said, “you have spyware that has made it through your firewall. ( I hate it when that happens, especially when I was the one who opened the door for the dirty bird.) I thought, okay I got myself into this, I can get myself out. I tried to delete the Gamevance from my programs list, but found out that is only a temporary fix. The spyware is designed to reconnect when the computer restoration begins. This is worse than gum on your shoe! Researching on line, I found what appeared to be a specific program to remove the problem. But further investigation revealed I would be purchasing the fix from Gamevance. Tell me this is NOT a SCAM!!!!
My next call was to my computer dude, Skip. Within an hour Skip had my problem fixed. Skip also found out this contains Trojans which you do not want on your computer. I highly recommend him if you need assistance with computer problems. Valley’s Best Computers 623.547.7711. He can dial in and no one has to leave their chairs.Now don’t get me wrong, after the residue was gone I got right back on twitter and gave my best warning in 140 characters. Twitter is a great tool, just be careful about opening emails sent from tweets (twitter messages) that you do not know. There is no issue if you are reading just from the twitter page.
Gamevance Categorized as: Adware Online explaination“Software that is designed to launch advertisements, frequently pop-up ads, on a user’s computer and/or to redirect search results to promotional Web sites. Adware programs are often built into freeware or shareware programs, where the adware creates an indirect ‘charge’ for using the free program. Sometimes a trojan can silently download an adware program from a Web site and install it onto a user’s machine. Hacker tools, or Browser Hijackers, can also download an adware program by exploiting a web browser’s vulnerability. Browser Hijackers may tamper with the browser settings, redirect incorrect or incomplete URLs to unwanted Web sites, or change the default home page. They can also re-direct a user’s searches to “pay-to-view” (often pornographic) Web sites.Typically, many adware programs do not leave any marks of their presence in the system: they are not listed on Start Programs; they add no icons to the system tray; and they don’t show up on the task list. In addition, adware programs seldom provide an un-installation procedure, and attempts at manually removing them frequently result in failure of the original carrier program.”
Jodie
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