Warning: Virus from Google Alerts

[caraex]

For the second time in the last year my computer has been infected with several viruses by clicking on a Google Alert. My antivirus program did not catch them.

Barbara

[cindybidar]

Barbara can you clarify that? Are you talking about clicking a link that appears in your Google alert? Or are you talking about a different kind of alert?

[caraex]

Cindy, I'm talking about clicking on a Google Alert. I get one list of Google Alerts every day - there are usually 6 or 8 Alerts in each list. I clicked on one and was immediately infected. I could not open IE or anything else - had to take to a repair shop to get it cleaned. Same thing happened about a year ago.

Barbara

[cindybidar]

That stinks. I used to get Google alerts for my keywords, but the alerts were all so spammy that I finally turned them all off. Now I just use it for my name.

[russell]

wow, thats crazy, I have noticed that some of mine end up in the spam folder. I wonder if thats why. Do you think it could be just google alerts doing what you asked, but it happend to return results that had crap in them.

[angienewton]

Yep happened to me last month. It's not Google but rather the website that Google alerted you about for your keyword phrase. I always try to look at the link before I click through to it but that doesn't always help. Things just started popping up all over the place so I just kept closing them (never click on any of them even if they say to let your anti virus fix them, it's all a virus).

Sorry you had virus issues, it's no fun!

[egoistic]

It also happen to me once. I think that google doesn't really pays much attention on the quality of sites that they would put on the alert. Its just the relativity so websites infected with virus can slip out.

[David Jackson]

For the second time in the last year my computer has been infected with several viruses by clicking on a Google Alert. My antivirus program did not catch them.

I doubt very seriously that Google Alerts is the source of your viruses. I've used GA for years without any problems, as have many other GA users.

I suspect your virus problems may lie elsewhere.

David Jackson

[WAHumor]

I've learned to be choosy about which links I check in my lists of Google Alerts.

I was getting notices of links from some fairly weird sites, like obscure shoe blogs displaying an old article.

Alertee emptor!


Dan



P.S. I think one of those links could have caused your virus problem. Google just sends 'em, they don't debug 'em!!

[AlexNewell]

I agree with David and doubt that the email from Google is the problem - I get tons of Google alerts with no issues but for sure lots of the blogs I click onto are junk and they may well have viruse

Maybe I'm being too "simple" but any decent Anti Virus should stop this. I use Avast, it's free and superb with 2 updates every day and all incoming emails scanned.

@ Dan shouldn't that be Caveat Alertee?

:-)