Aqua rank/ adware software? - Aquarium Advice

fort384 · 03-14-2009, 09:57 PM

Last night when I clicked on the aquarank link to vote for AA, I was redirected to an automatic download of "antivirus-1" which is a pretty malicious piece of spyware/adware disguised as antivirus software. It took me a couple of hours to manually remove it from my harddrive/registry. Not sure if it was AA or aquarank related, or maybe I just had some other Trojan that redirected my browser as I clicked the link. Has anyone else had this problem?

**Zagz** · 03-14-2009, 10:06 PM

No I haven't had the problem. I vote everyday and never had this happen once. Sometimes Aquarank is down but it is a separate site and I just try again later.

fort384 · 03-14-2009, 10:11 PM

Yup agreed zags. I click it every day without incident. But yesterday it def redirected to a different link. Was really weird.

**Zagz** · 03-14-2009, 10:29 PM

That is very odd. I am betting it was a redirect. Hopefully it doesn't happen again to you.

newfound77951 · 03-14-2009, 11:52 PM

I had something similar happen to me 1/2 hour ago. The link went to a pdf but I didn't let it open, I immediately hit back on the browser as soon as I realized something was weird. My computer was very slow afterwards but I have now restarted and it appears fine...of course I also just backed everything up (dissertation!) and am now running every virus and malware program I have, but it may not have been an isolated incident.

fort384 · 03-15-2009, 12:04 AM

Same thing happened when I did. Be thorough, from what I read the program is vicious. Check your program manager and make sure av.exe (or similar) isn't running. Sounds like this could be an issue...

**Zagz** · 03-15-2009, 12:26 AM

If it continues, I guess it would be good to alert Aquarank as it is their link.

fort384 · 03-15-2009, 12:32 AM

I think if there is a problem, it is likely on the AA side... If it is indeed an issue and not an isolated incident or related to aquarank, it might be a good idea to temporarily bring down the link. Of course that is up to the tech admins... For now I am just not going to vote.

newfound77951 · 03-15-2009, 01:23 AM

FYI I saw it while voting from another site.

fort, I just checked my program manager and I don't see anything resembling av.exe besides all the avg.exes I have from my actual virus software (called AVG). But I will keep checking and run the spyware program every day for the next few. And keep backing up everything!

krap101 · 03-15-2009, 01:30 AM

Well, I just clicked on the "vote for aa" clicky in fort's thing, and Avast said something about a virus being blocked. I tried again and nothing happened, so it might just be an oversensitive virus blocker.