How does THIS happen????

I recently responded to a question on the "trip Planning" forum

I noticed this morning that my 2nd sentence got hacked:

"When you get to the orientation, you just tell the ranger what camp site you want to stay at. If the site is not filled to capacity, you got it."

There is now an advertising link attached to the word "stay".

How does this happen?

Can one of the moderators please kill the link...in this post and the other

Hey Ed, either another mod has already fixed it, or it isn't there now in your original post. There was a link on the word "stay" in this post, but it just directed back to this thread when I checked it. I've gone ahead and removed the recursive the link above, anyway. 

Just as a precaution, I would recommend changing your password. 

Dave, any thoughts?

Hi Ed-

I don't see a link anywhere in your original post, either as it's displayed on the site, nor as it's stored in the database, nor in our internal email notifications from when you posted it.

Are you still seeing a link there? If so, could you please PM me the URL to which it's linking? 

Anybody else see a link in Ed's original post, or noticed anything similar in other posts?

Oops, looks like we were typing at the same time. 

I couldn't locate a link in the original post. 

Not happening on my work computer.

Dave, if it's still around when I get home tonight, I'll send you the link. It had something to do with a health clinic.

e

Ed G said:

I recently responded to a question on the "trip Planning" forum

 

I noticed this morning that my 2nd sentence got hacked:

"When you get to the orientation, you just tell the ranger what camp site you want to stay at. If the site is not filled to capacity, you got it."

There is now an advertising link attached to the word "stay".

How does this happen?

 

Can one of the moderators please kill the link...in this post and the other

 It was the grammar police.  They wanted to point out that you could have been more concise:  "When you get to the orientation, just tell the ranger what camp site you want."

Grin

Always wonderful to hear from the pedantic fairy.

No, no link and I've never seen that happen before on a site like this, but, I have seen links like this deliberately placed in online news stories that link to related stories, but I've also seen words used as links to ads unrelated to the story itself. In this instance, it might be malware on your computer. I would run a scan and see what pops up

Yup - happening on my home computer.

My IP is CenturyLink.net

even my response to Dave has links in it.

The word computer takes you to zBiddy.com and the word health takes you to individualhealthquotes.com

Well, I think I found the issue!

Last weekend I down loaded some stuff in order to see the Steelers online.

I just removed those programs, and the links were removed too.

Thanks for the hint to check my system Tom.

Very interesting. I'm no computer expert, Ed, but I figured it had to be something like that. Links just don't appear out of nowhere, something is creating them. At least you were able to figure out what it was and delete it. Sometimes, the malware gets imbedded in your system and it's almost impossible to get rid of without using some kind of recovery program. Don't know how they work, but I have read about these programs doing all kinds of things you don't want them doing.

I have found CCleaner to do a pretty good job of clearing out those things that are not caught by Microsoft's firewall, Firefox's cleaner, and McAfee and Norton's protection schemes. Also not opening any email that slips through offering a bazillion dollars for helping some refugee from Nigeria get gold bars out of Africa helps a lot. Plus there are all sorts of "observers" (some legitimate and some not so legitimate) that spy on your use of the web - you can see what they are with Ghostery (right now, there are 9 trying to track me on this page). Some of them are put there on websites so that sponsored sites can get paid for looks at the ads being run. Only problem with CCleaner and Firefox's Tools is that they clean out all the cookies as well that let a site recognize you as a "regular" and keep you signed in (after you run the cleaning programs, you have to remember all your obscure passwords, which can be pretty tricky if you get assigned something like Ab*&%ghIJ25 (no, that is not one of my passwords), or the site requires "at least 14 characters including both upper and lower case, 2 special symbols and 3 numbers" (as one of my frequented sites does). I use 3 different browsers, depending on what I am looking at (some sites require Microsoft's Internet Explorer, so I can't see them on my iPad's Safari or whatever my Android phone uses). Apple's iOS seems to be pretty good about not picking up the viruses, worms, and other nefarious hidden code.

I too use ccleaner. Good stuff

I run it after each visit to the www.

tell me more about Ghostery

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