This is utterly so annoying. I finally got a set up completed with a new Mac computer all by itself on a secure network via router, etc. The only purpose of this machine is for financial related purposes, i.e. trading, bill payments, banking, etc.
I have a completely different setup for emails, media, youtube, etc.
So I am on the phone in a rush and I needed to grab a quick bit of info. I typed in the url of a legit finance insitution, but mistyped actually and did not realize it fast enough.
The fat fingered address immediately routed me to some fake website. You know the ones that look like a 12 year old kid put them together using old school HTML code from 1998.
No pop ups appeared. The page was loaded with a bunch of links/topics of interest to have the appearance of legitimacy. I closed it pretty quickly and disconnected the router and cable modem. Nothing downloaded or attempted to download either.
For integrity purposes do I have to reformat everything all over again and build this thing from scratch with this kind of compromise or am I just being silly? Anyone with simliar experience?
Post the fat-fingered version of the URL, I'll go to the site and take a look at the HTML to see if there appears to be anything nefarious going on there.
Overall I'd say you're fine as-is but if you did have a backup from a previous day that you could easily roll back to it wouldn't hurt. I certainly wouldn't reformat the machine and start over - that strikes me as major overkill.
If you are that worried about security you should configure your firewall to only allow access to sites that you need to access (whitelist) and block everything else outbound, that will keep you from having this problem again.
Post the fat-fingered version of the URL, I'll go to the site and take a look at the HTML to see if there appears to be anything nefarious going on there.
Overall I'd say you're fine as-is but if you did have a backup from a previous day that you could easily roll back to it wouldn't hurt. I certainly wouldn't reformat the machine and start over - that strikes me as major overkill.
If you are that worried about security you should configure your firewall to only allow access to sites that you need to access (whitelist) and block everything else outbound, that will keep you from having this problem again.
Thanks for your consideration. Appreciate it. The setup is only a few days old, so unfortunately I did not configure "time machine" yet. I actually have a whitelist on a different setup, but figured since I was going to be so OCD about this new setup and was only using a limited amount of specific sites, would not need it. That was rather stupid.
I will definitely send you the URL but its going to be a few days. I have an old laptop not with me presently that I use just for these kinds of situations. So I will re-inact what I did this morning and let you know.
Mac attacks are very rare from other websites like that. Even Windows 7 gets attacked less now than xp did.
I use a hardware firewall, and enterprise antivirus/malware protection. I browse regularly on my trading computer with no problems. If you want to count windows firewall and a router in, I have that too.
Delete your cookies though, I always ban sites from using cookies on my system for privacy reasons.
Google the site, they'll warn you if it is potentially harmful to your computer.
Quote from DeltaSpread:
This is utterly so annoying. I finally got a set up completed with a new Mac computer all by itself on a secure network via router, etc. The only purpose of this machine is for financial related purposes, i.e. trading, bill payments, banking, etc.
I have a completely different setup for emails, media, youtube, etc.
So I am on the phone in a rush and I needed to grab a quick bit of info. I typed in the url of a legit finance insitution, but mistyped actually and did not realize it fast enough.
The fat fingered address immediately routed me to some fake website. You know the ones that look like a 12 year old kid put them together using old school HTML code from 1998.
No pop ups appeared. The page was loaded with a bunch of links/topics of interest to have the appearance of legitimacy. I closed it pretty quickly and disconnected the router and cable modem. Nothing downloaded or attempted to download either.
For integrity purposes do I have to reformat everything all over again and build this thing from scratch with this kind of compromise or am I just being silly? Anyone with simliar experience?
