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Really Strange Happenings

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jpollack

IS-IT--Management
Jan 26, 2005
162
US
I am at work and during my break I want to check out a local restaurant called the Brass Elephant. So, I input brass elephant into google and search for their url, its the first site on the list, so I click it and my browser is forwarded to amaena.com/winantivirus thats full of popups that are telling me that me computer is full os spyware and I need to download their software and run a scan, which I don't do. I know this machine I am using is clean, so I try antoher clean machine using both google and yahoo and the same thing happens. My laptop which runs ubuntu linux is with me so I fire it up and open up firefox and type brass elephant into google and the same thing happens, but I noticed on the status bar before I was forwarded to amaena.com the browser was searching for gscript.com, which is some sort os internet Ad company. I thought that it is highly unlikely that my Linux install would have some how gotten infected. As a clincher I used remote desktop into my home PC to test this out and sure enough via msn search the same forwarding action happened. This is crazy, I tried several other search combinations and I was unable to get my browser to be forwarded again. What is up here? Is the Ad agency and amaena.com/winantivirus somehow using some new form to infect someones computer? Where and why does the search string "brass elephant" envoke the highjack? When I thought I have seen it all. Has anyone ever seen this before?

John
 
Yip, they will be suing this url to infect people who believe they are going to a legit site. This is when a hosts file and IE spyad comes in handy as well as a proxy web filer like proxomitron!

Member of ASAP Alliance of Security Analysis Professionals

under the name khazars
 
Actually I just tried the link and got in straight away, the restaurant is in Baltimore?

Member of ASAP Alliance of Security Analysis Professionals

under the name khazars
 
Thanks for the input. Yes, the restaurant is in Baltimore.
 
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