Hackers out!

Yesterday morning, working away in Word, but with Edge open, my laptop suddenly started to emit a most unpleasant whistle. Which was traced to the display left, in a new Edge window.

A display which if not from Microsoft had been reasonably carefully dressed in Microsoft clothes. On the other hand, the address at the top of the screen (omitted from this snap) did not look very Microsoft flavoured, starting with a long messy looking string of characters, followed by '/cloudfront.net...'.

Then I got another display, even more threatening, but I was starting to think that someone was about to ask for some money, in some guise or another, in order to remove whatever it was that had landed on my screen. Time to close things down.

And as it happened, I was able to close the Edge windows involved and carry on as if nothing had happened. Perhaps I should have restarted to be on the safe side. But I did take an external copy of my important files, something which is a lot easier these days than it was say twenty years ago, before data sticks came of age. And I did ask Windows Defender to run a quick scan, which made a nil return. No threats to be seen.

I associated to a science fiction film in which the flagship of some star fleet under attack by the bad aliens, is saved, the only ship to be saved, because the commander is old-speak enough to refuse to have his ship online, and so be vulnerable to cyber-attack by said bad aliens.

I also spoke to the BT Help Desk who assured me that there was nothing to worry about, with most of the problem resting with some or other website that my laptop was in touch with, unbeknown to me. Windows Defender was on the case. Not altogether convinced by these blandishments, but so far all seems to be well.

While this morning I asked Bing about Cloudfront, which turns out to be a service from some part of the Amazon empire, but a name which is used by various bad people, for example those talked about at reference 1 - although the symptoms there were not those that I experienced.

Who are all these people who think it clever or find it profitable to do this kind of thing? One might have thought that someone with the necessary skills would know better; not like the young men who like smashing trolleys into lampposts at all. See reference 3.

PS: the laptop involved in an HP EliteBook built for Windows 7, but which is now running Windows 10. Generally well behaved.

Reference 1: https://malwaretips.com/blogs/cloudfront-net-virus-removal/.

Reference 2: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/. Appears to be some kind of a service for the developers of Internet based applications. Nothing to do with selling books or pots & pans at all.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/trolley-171.html.