(01-16-2024, 07:59 PM)Chiefsmom Wrote: The ones I have seen always have the same site address posted. Someone said it is a virus or something.
I suggested a throat punch, for the author of the thread would be a good idea. But I've seen several of the same link, every day for a couple of days.
Yup, gotta be careful with links. A bad actor - say, a hacker group or 3-letter agency - can set up a website that may or may not actually deliver anything, like advertising or alleged news, but within the code of that site they may place a script that downloads a RAT (Remote Access Terminal) to your computer. It doesn't have to be big, all it has to do is open a door through your browser that gives them a little control over your computer. Once they have that wee bit of control, they can use it to download bigger, more "useful" programs to your computer.
One those bigger programs are loaded onto your computer, they can be set to start whenever your computer starts, and "phone home" to notify the attacker that a)you are online (or your computer is), and b)what your current IP address is so they can connect their remote client to a local server they've installed on your computer.
Once connected, they can ransack your computer, steal ANYTHING that is stored on it, or download more nefarious things to your computer, like keyloggers which log all of your keystrokes, on or off line, and upload the logs of your keystrokes back to the attacker on a regular basis, whenever you get online and open the pipeline
Effectively, it gives them full control of your computer, as if they were sitting at your keyboard themselves... and it can all be done quietly, without any notification to you that anything is going on at all.
So beware random "advertising" links or those blasted "shortened" links, especially in e-mails or on "conspiracy" sites, because those are the very sorts of folks that a 3-letter agency might want to target. Link shorteners are often used to mask the true destination of a link click until it is too late and the RAT is already downloaded.
It's why I have disabled my browsers from running scripts automatically on this computer. I want to know what I'm getting before I get it, not after it's too late.
It's a scary cyber-world out there!
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