Malware! - Once were trusted are now blighted.

A short rant.

Malware.... is bolder all the time.

I avoid most of the popups, ads and, I hope most of the drive-by installs that tempt would be happy clickers.

But I happened to be doing some maintenance on our Family PC and needed to download Filezilla. So I visited SourceForge using the default browser, while logged in with the admin account.

It is extremely disappointing when a trusted site offers a warning that says "Installer will be downloaded and will provide some options during the install process (shortly) with the download link.... and then proceeds to attempt #deception, #misdirection and #randsom.
#Shameon #SourceForge!

Well...  I didn't like that message and clicked the direct link....

Silly me...  That just launched the "installer faster".    I hate download managers and all that they represent.,. just give me the GD file.

Sigh... I've done it before... whatever...

First Step ..            That seems legit ... OK... Next 

Second Step:             Standard legalese,   OK... Next

Third Step:          Basic Installation it says.... 

     .... That's an odd place in the process to be asked an "installation  preference"

      ... AND that's an odd place in the process to be asked an "installation  preference"   

      ..... Hey, what's that dot? What's Vosteran ! 

Vosteran Search is a browser hijacker, which is promoted via other free downloads, and once installed it will change your browser homepage and default search engine to vosteran.com. The Vosteran.com homepage will display advertisements and sponsored links in your search results, and may collect search terms from your search queries. The Vosteran.com hijack is used to boost advertising revenue, as in the use of blackhat SEO, to inflate a site’s page ranking in search results. (http://malwaretips.com/blogs/remove-vosteran-search/)

!SourceForge this is misdirection anyway you slice it! A once trusted site gone rogue!

Simultaneously another popup occurs... 

One of my favorites legacy scams! 

Optimizer Pro... Seriously - Does anyone actually click on these any more? or are they just there to annoy.

So.. to kill a rant that could go on for days... I didn't get fooled or infected by these... But for the rest of you ..... "Be careful out there" :-)

Happy New Year!

(ps I don't know if hashtags work here @ blogspot but I did-em anyway.)