I got hit with … something yesterday (Tuesday, January 5, at about 3:00 pm MST) while surfing the SDMB, using Windows IE7. Unfortunately, I didn’t collect any of the information Tuba mentioned above–I was at work and when things went wonky, I got our systems guy working on it. Anyway, FWIW, here’s what I can remember.
As a member, I don’t see ads, but my computer started acting funny after I clicked a link in the Awesome lawyer letter thread in MPSIMS. The link was supposed to go to one of the letters that the posters were talking about. The window opened, but nothing appeared. What also happened was that a bunch of windows appeared and disappeared, so quickly as to have a strobe effect. They eventually stopped and I went back to work.
Shortly after that, Google searches worked fine, but much of the time, clicking on the top search result or two redirected me to unfamiliar search sites. A few examples would be argylecomm (dot) com, zanuga (dot) com, toseeka (dot) com, freshdeals (dot) com, casearch (dot) ca, and a number of others whose names I cannot remember.
One thing I have noticed is that what I click seems to be redirected through a second URL in order to get to the final one. For example, suppose I search for something I need to research (such as “canada federal acquisition regulation”) and click the top result, which purports to be a Canadian government page, and whose URL (which appears at the bottom of my browser window) is also that of a government page. Here’s what happens:
– The URL at the bottom of the window changes to 9237242 (dot) cn followed by a slash then a bunch of seemingly-random numbers and letters. (No “www,” by the way.)
– Then the url at the bottom changes to something innocent-sounding: like lindachapin (dot) com (some kind of business?), or kickbright (dot) com (who knows?), or irajunction (dot) com (some kind of investment page?). These pages do not appear.
– Then the unwanted target page appears–this is the argylecomm, zanuga, etc. pages mentioned above.
A look through the “Recent Pages” history shows that the browser may have been redirected through two to four innocent URLs before arriving at the unwanted target. Other entries in the Recent Pages state simply “redirect” or “jump.”
I don’t know if any of this helps, or whether the SDMB is related to this problem; but as I said, it started occurring after the problems I had with that linked window in the Lawyer’s Letter page. And our systems guy is working on the problem here. But for what it’s worth, this is what’s been happening to me.
