Strange survey pop-up

[Gorgon_Heap]

While opening a thread in the gaming forums my computer spontaneously opened another interweb tab declaring I'd been chosen by GitP for some sort of annual survey.

I don't know if this was some very clever pop-up ad or datamining thing of some sort, but I thought I should warn whomever that something is using the GitP name to solicit information in exchange for a "reward."

Weed it out? Give a community warning?

Just FYI.

-GH

[Grinner]

I've never been selected for an annual GitP survey... :smallfrown:

But seriously, it's likely a problem on your end, and you should run a malware scan. It wouldn't be hard to write malware to do this.

[Rawhide]

As Grinner mentioned, you should definitely do a virus/malware scan. Giant in the Playground does not use any such popups, surveys, or advertising (except, in the case of advertising, for the two Project Wonderful ad boxes on the top and bottom of the forums, which cannot contain scripts, only images hosted on Project Wonderful's site).

[Gorgon_Heap]

Mmph. Really? Nuts. Coming up on redoing my AVG anyway.

Stupid computers.

[Winds]

I would also recommend Spybot-Search and Destroy.

[Douglas]

Check your browser extensions/plugins too, that's a likely source of Internet-specific problems and in my experience often slips by scans.

[Winter_Wolf]

There's apparently a nasty little thing going around by the name PremierOpinion, which seems to be the product of an internet marketing company. I had a hell of a time getting rid of it, just discovered it yesterday but it was apparently sitting on my hard drive for almost a month in my Program Files (x86) folder and required deleting every .dll in the folder, then rebooting, then trying to delete it over a dozen times before I finally stumbled on something—and I don't recall exactly whether I killed a process tree or somehow finagled something else, because it finally allowed itself to get deleted after an hour or two of trying things. It's entirely possible that it was a malware time bomb, or that because of the sheer number of security features I have it couldn't get past all of them, but lately I've been needing to keep my task manager open a lot and saw that suspicious process running. It sent Spybot S&D into fits when I tried to kill the process, and I had no choice but to reboot, before I got things sorted out.