Sonic.net

Anybody get a pop-up from guineasurvey.com with a link to a survey purportedly about performance from sonic.net? Looked like a phishing expedition, especially as the fine print said there was no connection to sonic.net.

Unfortunately, those do happen. They use available information to find out who your ISP is and change the pop-up accordingly. If you were on a Comcast or AT&T connection, for example, it would have popped up claiming the survey was from them.

Hi! Does this mean it's a scam or phishing situation? I answered the survey :/

Most of the ones I have seen rely on you accepting the free rewards at the end. They ask for credit card info for shipping and in very small, fine print at the bottom declare that you are also signing up for payments of X every month. It never hurts to run a virus scan on your computer though if you have virus protection software.

Yep... just got the popup (with voice) ... second time today (the first popup/voice, a few hours ago, was "virus detected, call number, etc.") . Both are bullshit and both arrived in the form of new tabs in my browser. Immediately following the earlier popup I ran a couple of "cleaner" programs to get rid of dead files and scrub my registry, etc. Then I downloaded and ran Microsoft's malwarebytes utility (ran a "full scan"... took best part of an hour)... no viruses or anything else found.

My Widows 10 O/S (a "nuke and install" a couple of weeks ago) is fully patched (as of this morning, coincidentally) and I run a licensed version of Vipre for firewall and virus protection.

I've run Firefox for years, always the latest version. Given this most recent "uninvited tab" I will, as soon as I finish writing this reply, uninstall Firefox and suffer through the learning curve for Edge. If, after doing that, I get another of these popup scams then I'll find and license an alternative to Vipre.

I don't much care about the scammers but it pisses me off to have to deal with the downstream effects of their intrusions on MY computer.

I think Edge will have the same problems.

If you're a Firefox or Chrome user, installing AdblockPlus from https://adblockplus.org stops 99% of these bogus advertisers/scams including the downright malicious ads that may make their way into legitimate ad networks.

drew.phillips wrote:If you're a Firefox or Chrome user, installing AdblockPlus

OP may also want to consider uBlock Origin. Personally I feel its interface isn't that intuitive compared to ADP but it was created to be less bloaty than ADP. You can also block JS using it--like a lightweight NoScript/SafeScript. I've migrated away from ADP to uBlock Origin.

Guest wrote:I've run Firefox for years, always the latest version.

Besides the suggestions to use AdBlock Plus, I'd recommend installing the NoScript Extension. It stops Javascripts from running, but you can whitelist domains that you trust.

Usually, that type of pop-up or new tab is due to the site calling Javascript from another site. If Javascript is blocked, the pop-up/new tab is also blocked. It also stops nasty advertising scripts.

virtualmike wrote:

Guest wrote:I've run Firefox for years, always the latest version.

Besides the suggestions to use AdBlock Plus, I'd recommend installing the NoScript Extension. It stops Javascripts from running, but you can whitelist domains that you trust.

Usually, that type of pop-up or new tab is due to the site calling Javascript from another site. If Javascript is blocked, the pop-up/new tab is also blocked. It also stops nasty advertising scripts.

I second virutalmike's suggestion. I once clicked on a link that would have stolen a password cookie but NoScript stopped it.

uBlock Origin on Chrome didn't stop it. Just now I got redirected from Ranker.com to guineasurvey.com, asking me to rate my ISP (not Sonic).