Several very dangerous spam posts have appeared here and elsewhere on Usenet groups. Sometimes one can open a spam post by accident. Many of these posts offer you something free. When you enter their site, you may have all types of flashing security warnings on the screen. These are not the warnings that some browser such as Firefox give you but are rather part of the spam site. It may try to scare you that virus and malware problems have been detected and say that you have to click a certain button to get rid of the problems, or you will have very serious problems and your computer may shut down. If you do click their button, various bad things can happen. The most popular right now is to make your computer send spam to other computers. Also some use this for massive denial of service attacks. Of course they may also be after your personal information. If you click on such a spam site, first exit the browser, if possible, which is often done by clicking the red X in the extreme upper right corner of the screen. If you can not find how to exit the browser, as a last result unplug the computer from power. In any event, do not click on anything on the screen of the spam site. If you do this you likely will be safe. However it would be good to run any virus protection and malware programs you have at once.
- posted
13 years ago