Hey, All. Occasionally I get the Urgent Chrome Update and Short 30 Second Survery Phishing scams poping up in my Chrome tabs. Anybody know the history of these things? I’m curious to how they can do this. My guess is that they are doing it via website advertisements but I’ve really lost my tech creds over the last decade and most of the net might as well be magic to me at this point. Or does the website have to be “hacked” and have some type of malicious code inserted into it?
As far as I can tell, you can’t be harmed as long as you do not download the chrome update and run it or hand over your info in the survey.
It’s almost certainly coming through as an ad from a poorly curated ad service. Should you ever come across something like that, you can exit your browser via task manager (in case the “x” has been masked) and run active malware/av scans.
Hey Thanks! I wondered about that. I just couldn’t imagine that fraudsters/phishers would pay money to spread their poison hooks. Or maybe they use stolen credit cards and just get little bursts here and there until the cards get blocked. What a world.
It’s important to heavily curate your Chrome extension list on a regular basis. There are two reason for this:
My wife has gotten a bunch of ads popping up in Chrome that never go away. Upon inspection somehow extra extensions had gotten installed whose whole purpose was to display advertisements (and pretty blatant about it). I don’t know how they got installed (I blame my wife for clicking on crap but we’ll just keep that between us here) but they uninstalled pretty easily.
A LOT of adware/malware companies will buy popular chrome extensions for their user base, then do a silent update that inserts ads all over the place. They are constantly spamming extension developers trying to find new targets.
