In which Techie has a run-in with adware · 4:44am Jan 3rd, 2018
I just knew that "installer" had something up its sleeve.
It all started with noticing that a file I downloaded had a .exe extension rather than the .jar that I expected. Coming from a rather shady download website, I suspected something was up when bringing up the file properties showed that the supposed pixel art generator jarfile was actually a "downloader".
What did I do about it?
I clicked on it anyways, thinking at the time that it was just gonna extract itself like many winzip self-extracting files do and give me the jarfile.
Nope. Instead, Chrome reboots itself in the background very noticeably, and upon opening a new tab, I noticed that something was off. Specifically, the New Tab page was completely replaced by a generic, one-off page.
Further digging revealed that the page was actually sending data to something that identified itself as "Newtab.review", which with some googling, revealed to be a page that replaced the new tab page on browsers with itself to track and log/send user activity to a collection server.
Tricky, tricky.
It's a good freakin' thing I knew exactly where it came from, too. Otherwise it would've taken much longer to purge it from my computer compared to the ~10 minutes it took.
Lesson: Find more legit websites to download from, and make sure you know what things are.
Nowing me I'd probably note even realise and just lie down and cry as my computer slowly shat it self...
yikes