!!!URGENT: BAD VIRUS GOING AROUND, PLEASE READ!!!
This is ScorecardResearch. A terrible virus, an awful popup, & something that should be avoided at all costs.
Be careful of the malicious websites you go on. One of them may install behind your back this popup. ScorecardResearch is a dangerous pop-up virus. It seems legit, right? But why would something just pop up without your permission? I received this twice. After the second time, I decided to look into it.
I started noticing that whenever I loaded a page, Chrome would have this at the bottom:
Why is this working behind the scenes of my browser?
According to BotCrawl.com, this is what ScorecardResearch is:
“ScorecardResearch.com, including b.scorecardresearch.com, and Scorecard Research surveys are categorized as severe malware, and is most noted to be connected to a Trojan infection that attempts to disguise as a legitimate marketing research group collecting anonymous data and information about the user’s internet activity, usage, etc.”
Do not click into this. Don’t touch anything. Close the tab immediately. Go through all your programs, addons, etc, & delete anything suspicious. Scan your computer, delete your cookies & clear your cache, do whatever it takes. You can read more here.
tl;dr — Do not trust ScorecardResearch. This thing will fuck you over.
*****GUYS. LISTEN. I HAVE THIS. I AM AN EXPERIENCED DEFENSIVE HACKER (I HACK THE HACKERS), AS WELL AS A LICENCED COMPUTER TECHNICIAN. AND I STILL GOT THIS PIECE OF SHIT MALWARE. NOBODY. IS. IMMUNE.*****
I’m not an idiot about what pages I visit. Chrome, Avira, and my own protections that I made with my own ten fingers made sure that I was able to browse safely. I have NO clue as to where this little bugger came from, but I was alerted when random words in a post were underlined!
Shortly after that, a keylogger was detected. I accessed it and terminated it from the source, but it cropped back up for another six hours until I was finally able to get it off my trail. Because of how long this had gone undetected (around two days) I had already lost access to my banking information, my email, two of my five YouTube accounts (I do tutorials and machinima), and an account for a small forum that I no longer visit.
I was screwed.
I had to get a new bank card, and I got the rest of the accounts back eventually, except for the one I no longer used or cared about. I had to switch to Opera from my beloved Chrome as I formulated a plan. Avira picked up nothing. I don’t trust any other antivirus to do a clean enough job about it, but it still didn’t find anything. There was nothing installed in my Extensions or in Control Panel.
I installed ScriptSafe and blacklisted b.scorecardresearch. I think that you all should do the same. This also affected my girlfriend’s mother who is a Mac user, so it’s not only a Windows thing.
I need to reblog this here because I have more followers on here than anything and I want you guys to stay incredibly safe.
