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I misspelt google as "googe" (very dumb, yes). It took me to a page that asked me to enter my birthdate. The URL was something along the lines of luj dott proasdf dott com

After going to malware index, it looks like it redirected to the same page as the infamous goggle site. It is labelled as a browser hijacker. I didn't notice any weirdness in my laptop and did a scan with malwarebytes. Nothing came up.

Should I be worried?

schroeder
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mistes
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3 Answers3

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The type of attack that you are describing is called a 'drive-by attack', where your device is attacked simply by surfing to a malicious website. If you are using a modern web browser, and your device and your browser are up to date with all updates, then it's unlikely that such an attack (if there even was one) would have been successful. See Do drive-by attacks exist in modern browsers? for some interesting reading on this subject.

mti2935
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  • So I saw that my browser was indeed not up to date for a while. Assuming the drive-by download and stuff did happen in the background, what do I do now? Should I scan with anything other than malwarebytes? – mistes Dec 30 '21 at 18:30
  • If you think there is a chance that you've been infected and you want to be absolutely sure that you are rid of the infection, then wipe your hard drive clean and re-install your operating system from scratch. – mti2935 Dec 30 '21 at 18:43
  • Very dumb question but will I have to wipe the hard drive clean with a separate program or will doing a fresh install with a bootable windows 10 usb be enough? – mistes Dec 30 '21 at 18:45
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Assuming that you have an up-to-date operating system and browser:

If you know that there was a hijacker on the page, it might be a good idea to reinstall the browser. Any plug-ins/extensions you have installed could be compromised.

Unless you have a reason to suspect something greater, I would not say that your whole machine is compromised.

schroeder
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Assuming your web browser is up to date, and you didn't enter anything into the survey box, or click on anything in there you should be okay.

Check your downloads to see if anything was automatically downloaded, and if so delete it.

I ran a scan on virus total, and it showed it was malicious, but if your antivirus doesn't pick anything up, then it should be pretty safe. Malwarebytes is generally pretty good.

If you're on mac then you should be even safer, and if you're on windows make sure you're only using the free version of malwarebyes, because otherwise windows defender deactivates, and run a scan with windows defender in case malware bytes was wrong.

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