Along with my own business. I do some work on the side as a rater for Google. What I do in a nutshell is rate the validity search strings for sites, images, etc…
Today I had a particular search, actually I don’t remember exactly what the search term was, but it landed me on a page from Yahoo! Video. The page was a directory of videos from a user called Mania_t_v. Frankly the videos were pretty useless, as they all seemed to be advertisements for the site called mania.tv. Now before you go checking out the site… don’t! After checking out some of the videos, although I’m not really into the topic (Hollywood gossip), I thought I would check out the site. The first time i tried, my browser Firefox crashed. Ok, odd… So, I started Firefox again and chose restore the session. It tried to access the site again, and BOOM! Not only did my browser crash, my computer crashed and restarted with a whole bunch of errors! I am currently running AVG Anti-Virus and Ad-Aware (I recommend both) to see what they infected the computer with. So far all I’ve found is some cookies that seem to be a bit dangerous, but I’m sure I’ll find something else considering none of my audio drivers work now…
So in short: Stay away from maniatv.com. I’m not sure if it is one of their that is malicious or those running the site. Hopefully Yahoo! Video will investigate this as well, because if someone is using there service to lure people to their site and then dumping Spy/Malware onto their machines. It could tarnish the image of Yahoo! And this only shortly after I was so happy with their service…
Well, I think my computer is free of of viruses/trojan horses/etc… I’ve done so many scans with various programs. Now I have an issue that every time I put a new disk in the computer all the files/folders show up with a little computer with a yellow screen covering the icons. I can’t figure out how to get ride of it. I think it came from one of the add-ons from Ad-Aware, but I don’t know which one and I’ve gone so far as to uninstall the program all the add-ons and do a reg clean. Still doesn’t get rid of it. Ugh!!! Maybe it will just go away.. unlikely