Topic: Another PGC pop-up spyware concern

[ruby_onix]

I've been using Mozilla Firefox as my standard web-browser for... probably over two months now. Not because I feel that it's required (or that is should be required), but I just like being safe, and felt like giving it a try (by the way, it is pretty sweet, and easy to use, for anyone else who's thinking of giving it a try).

Well the other day, I downloaded the English Tales of Symphonia demo. I tried to play it earlier today, and it didn't work (looking at the talkback thread, I think it probably timed out, as it was downloading pretty slowly, last I had seen). So I decided to try re-downloading it. I cracked out Internet Explorer, "just to be safe", and to make sure it wasn't a Firefox issue.

I hit PGC. Hit the ToS English demo page. And a pop-up tried to launch. But it didn't fully launch. It just crashed IE (how typical). I control-alt-deleted IE, reopened it, and my homepage was hijacked, to something spawning endless respawning pop-ups. I didn't look at what the page was long enough to get you any useful info before I nuked IE and fixed my homepage. Sorry about that.

I checked AdAware and it said that I had gotten some "malware" described as an "IE Hook" on my system. I didn't get any more details than that before I killed it. Sorry again. I'm in the process of giving my system a good cleaning with Spybot and Norton as well. If they come up with anything more specific, I'll let you know.

I'm not too worried about it, personally. It seems like just a simple page-hijacking. But I thought I'd let you know. And I know that you don't really have any control over the ads.

BTW, I don't think it was due to anything existing on my system, as the last time I checked it was about a week ago, and this is only the second time I've EVER gotten anything on my system. (The other time was a page-hijacking pop-up encountered at PGC as well.)

[RickPowers]

I have to admit, I'm pretty disgusted at how brazenly people are slipping this crap into ads.  I will point out that I use IE to browse the site, and haven't had this problem, but I've got not only a pop-up blocker in place (MSN Toolbar, or Google Toolbar, if you prefer), and I'm very careful to boot.

Regardless, if we aren't able to isolate the ads that are doing this, we'll come up with another option.  We're just trying to find out for sure WHAT precisely is causing the problems.  Some of these ads are REGIONAL to boot, and that's making it hard for some of us to catch them (which is probably why I've never seen them).