Has your computer been running slower? Mine has so I did some in-depth resource monitoring and found out that I have some malware that I suspect came from the SD. The malware calls up views.atdmt.com (sound familiar?) and then goes on to download an assload of tracking cookies. While this is going on, my CPU usage will shoot up to over 50% rendering my computer unoperable for the time.
Now why do I blame SD for this. Well for starters theres the two previous times I’ve been hit by malware from SD and the fact that SD uses views.atdmt.com for their advertising despite the numerous problems - like has SD even thought about my report that occassionally views.atdmt.com will load over 50 times (downloading tracking cookies maybe?) making my back button unusable.
If you’re curious if you’re hit too, go into task manager/performance/resource monitor. Go to network and keep an eye on things as you go around webpages. If you’re infected, you’ll eventually see a process that goes out to views.adtmt.com then a whole bunch of different sites. Right now it occurs about every 5 minutes on my machine.
I’m running IE 9 on a machine running Windows Vista, I just encountered an episode of this.
I opened my control panel, accidentally in the tab where I was viewing a thread. When I hit back and nothing happened, I pulled up the history list to manually skip back, found it full of the “views.admt.com” thing. I scrolled back the 10 at a time (limit of the visible history) 3 or 4 times, and still the log was full of that one link, couldn’t move back to the thread I was on. Had to go back to the forum list and reopen.
It hasn’t repeated yet, but that one time was frustrating.
I have only the SDMB and my gmail inbox open. I was in the circumcision thread in GD. Thankfully the infection was blocked, however I do not attribute this to my being circumcised.
So is anyone from the managment team going to respond to this, even with a “not our fault.” or “blame atlassolutions.” or “I really doubt this third time you’ve been hit with malware it was from our site.”? or will it just be ignored like all of the other malware via SD accusations in the past?
I have reported this to management. I have not heard anything back.
I also note that this has been a holiday weekend, one that might well have been longer for some people, I don’t know. I was out of town myself for quite a few days.
While tracking cookies can apparently be co-opted and used for malicious purposes, by and large their purpose is to build ad profiles of consumers that deliver targeted ads as people surf the web.
You may think this sort of thing is inappropriate, but the use of such techniques are widespread across the internet and if you access sites your device is filled with tracking cookies.
To add to the situation, we cannot tell at this point what exactly is going on.
Here’s our choices:
Entirely legitimate action that is being read by security software as malicious. (False positives are common.)
Entirely legitimate action that has mis-coding that accidentally screws up the back button on the browser page.
Hijack of the ad/ad coding with malware behind it.
Something else involving operating system software, browsers, browser settings, security software, and any interactions between any or all of the above mentioned.
With no more information from the Teeming Millions as to what ads this might be associated with, we have no way to determine the status of this situation. The ads on this site use “admt.com” tracking cookies to build customer profiles and deliver targeted ads. This is a legitimate use and happens everywhere around the internet and not just on this site.
Also have done a little bit of digging – and will do more – and we are not the only site having these problems recently.
Here’s a snippet of a note from the Chowhound site, which has had this problem off and on for a couple of months now. They originally suspected an ad hijack/malware issue.
I would like to compile a file of instances of this situation so we can look at the issue more fully and perhaps find some commonality to point us to the problem.
If you encounter this situation please report it to us. We need the following informaiton:
What you were doing when this happened.
What page you were looking at.
What ads (if any) you saw on the page.
Your device.
Your operating system.
What browser you’re using.
We want you to have the best experience possible here. When things go wrong we need your help and the information you provide to help us find the problem and any solutions. We cannot do it without your help, as we don’t know what to look at.
What you were doing when this happened.
It occurs whenever IE8 or Firefox is open.
What page you were looking at.
Doesn’t matter.
What ads (if any) you saw on the page.
N/A
Your device.
PC
Your operating system.
Win7 64 bit
What browser you’re using.
IE8 or Firefox
Every 5-10 minutes, there is a call made to views.atdmt.com (and adjusting the host file does not stop it), then there are calls to about 20 various websites that attempt to load tracking cookies. At times it will jack up my CPU usage to over 50% but now that spyware doctor is blocking those cookines, the problem is still there but doesn’t bog down my machine as much. Note: this is NOT the atdmt tracking cookie you read about on the web. This is malware that is hijacking my internet connection. Also note: Kapersky, MBAM and Spyware Doctor were all unable to find it. It seems pretty new and it is near impossible to find any info on it on the web.