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Monday, January 24, 2005

Spyware on Blogspot?

If you look to the upper right hand corner of this webpage, you will see an icon to go to the "next blog." Clicking on this icon will take you to a randomly selected Blogger blog. Yesterday I was surfing the web on my home computer and hit the "next blog" icon a few times to see what's out there. One of the hits was nana***.blogspot.com (the actual name has numbers in place of the astisks). Pop-ups immediately appeared on my computer immediately after I visited the nana blog, even though I have a pop-up blocker installed. I started getting messages about system resources, etc. I immediately closed all of my browsers, but it was too late. When I re-opened my browser it went to a different home page. My computer was hijacked!

Sure enough, Ad-aware (from lavasoft) indicated that my computer had been infected with the Search Miracle/Elite Bar virus.

I sent Blogger an e-mail to investigate. I will post their response. In the meantime, I will not be clicking on the "next blog" icon in the near future.

9 Comments:

Blogger oregonnerd said...

Thank you. Spotted from politech. I'm interested in what they say...this particular blog isn't terribly active for me (I mean my blog here).
Glenn

5:44 PM  
Blogger me said...

Glenn, you are welcome. Thanks for visiting.

6:10 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

So there are advantages of using Internet Explorer after all, nobody using Firefox or Opera would have stumbled upon this...

robert

8:40 PM  
Blogger me said...

unintended consequences? It's nice to be noticed, that's for sure.

9:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I have viewed your webpage using both Netscape 4.75 and Mozilla 1.4 from Linux. I do not see the advertised "next blog" icon with either browser. Has it been removed, or is this something that displays only in Microsoft's browser, or what? If it doesn't display, people are certainly protected from any ill effects of clicking on it!

6:45 AM  
Blogger me said...

This post was originally posted to our blog hosted by blogspot. (http://mtlaw.blogspot.com/2005/01/spyware-on-blogspot.html)

When we changed servers, all of our "old" postings moved to the new servers as well.

The benefit of moving from a blogspot hosted blog to our own server is that we can deactivate the NavBar with the "Next Blog" button.

10:19 AM  
Blogger bolan said...

Glenn, you are welcome. Thanks for visiting.

6:59 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think it now has ended...

12:10 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

i too was one of those who beleived that blogger communities are not reachable for the Spywares. But this Post is indeed proved to be very useful indeed, I've recently seen ome articles related to Spywares on the page www.anti-spam-info.com
.. You should also check out these useful articles

5:32 AM  

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