Friday, February 11, 2011

Possible coupons.com virus - watch out!

If you've tried to print any coupons off of the coupons.com website lately, you might have run into a bizarre page redirect virus. Here was the response posted on their Facebook page:
There are some posts about a virus being passed around the Web. This issue is unrelated to Coupons.com. There is a Fake AVG Anti-Virus virus that is redirecting users' browsers when they visit certain websites. Users who are seeing this redirect should search the Web for “Fake AVG Removal” for removal information. We can assure you that Coupons.com is not distributing viruses of any kind.
Which set off my bullshit meter as the kind of classic non-apology apology that corporate behemoths issue whenever they have seriously messed up and don't want to take responsibility. They went on to add in the comments:
This issue is affecting less than 1% of our users; However, there is a lot of buzz surrounding it on the coupon blogosphere so we felt compelled to clear the air on any rumors out there.

While our site remains safe for people who are uninfected by the virus, we are looking into how and why this browser redirect trojan is targeting our site on those computers that are infected by it.
The "1%" comment set off the kind of guffaws that greeted Ahmadinejad's assertion that there were no gay people in Iran. It's pretty clear that a lot more people than that have been affected. Also, several people who seem far more knowledgeable about this stuff than me chimed in to state that the problem was with a malicious ad on the coupons.com site itself, and that it wasn't merely a matter of users who already were infected with a virus running into problems on the site, but with the site actually infecting people with the virus.

What to do? The easiest solution, which has been supported by several users, when you get a suspicious popup or page redirect is to use ctrl-alt-del to bring up Task Manager, then close out your browser. Clicking anywhere on the window - including the "Close" button - could possibly install malicious software.

While coupons.com gets their act together, I'm at a bit of a loss for what to do in the meantime. I will attempt to check if any of the mirror sites that host the same coupons are also affected and, if not, I will point my links there instead.

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