It started like any other day: you were on the web looking at pictures of puppies. Pictures of puppies led to pictures of cats, which led to pictures of mice, which led to a video of a NYC rat dragging a slice of pizza down a set of stairs, which led you to think: pizza does sound good…
So off you go, fingers tapping, trying to find that pizza place you liked but couldn’t remember the name (something with a whale on it?). Googling “pizza place near me, whale” brings you more interesting photos and a link further down the page to what MAY be exactly what you’re looking for, and mouth watering, you click on it…
“This is it… THIS IS IT!! I REMEMBER THAT CARVED WHALE!” you say as the first image loads … but then something weird happens. That page vanishes, and is replaced by big banner ads and a popup that reads, ******YOUR COMPUTER IS OUT OF DATE******* CLICK BELOW TO FIX IT!
You click on the little ‘x’ to close the window, and it pops up again. You click it again, and 3 more pop-ups appear. Feeling defeated, you click the “OK” button at the bottom of the pop-ups to close them, but then a bunch of downloads initiate. You panic and hold the power button on your computer until it shuts off, hoping that whatever happened will just undo itself when you power back on.
You may think “I’m not a Bird on a Cable.™ There’s nothing I could’ve done to keep that from happening,” and you’d be partially correct. There was nothing you could’ve done to keep those pop-ups from getting in your way. The difference between how you handle it and how a Bird on a Cable handles it is what makes the difference between a simple annoyance vs a computer virus. And it’s all summed up by this simple act: You clicked on the pop-up.
There is a golden rule when dealing with pop-ups: “If you click it, it will win.” Don’t click on it. Don’t click anywhere on it. Not even the little ‘x’ that you think will close the window.
Instead, your course of action is as follows:
- Close the browsing window you are in. That means the entire webpage that the pop-up is in. If the browser or pop-up won’t close,
- Kill the process. Hold the keys “CTRL” + “ALT” + “DEL” and a window will open with the option for a “Task Manager”.
- Click on Task Manager, and find the “Processes” tab.
- Find any of the following, depending on the internet browser you use:
-Internet Explorer: “iexplorer”
-Google Chrome: “Google Chrome”
-Mozilla Firefox: “Firefox” - Click on your browser process and then click on “End Task”. You may have to do this for multiple processes, but once you have killed all of them, you should have halted the virus. Nice work.
Now just restart your browser and maybe order Chinese instead?