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.
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.
No you definitely don't need to reformat. 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.
It's probably nothing to worry about. Google the site, they'll warn you if it is potentially harmful to your computer.
Check into Zander Identity Theft insurance. It's $75/yr for a single person, $145 for family, up to $1mm in loss.
DeltaSpread, I'll say this. I think you are being overly paranoid and have nothing to worry about but since the OS is only a few days (or hours) old on the install, it may be worth your mental sanity to just bite the bullet and reinstall. It stinks but it's better now than a few months from now. No idea what the website was that you ended up being redirected to but you should be OK unless you clicked and downloaded something.
out of curiosity, just how much info can a site obtain about a visitor, even when it's only a single visit and there's no interaction - clicks on the site ? could a 'theft' site obtain a visitor's computer id and then monitor that computer so that in the future they could obtain passwords, account numbers etc at a later date ? but don't financial sites including brokers only accept transactions based on the id of the original computer - a transaction won't be accepted if made on another computer ? or is there a workaround for That ?
Sell this system for pennies!!!!! It has been totally compromised, but i'll use it and deal with all this massive burden. I'm amazed anyone is this paranoid...but i'll try to be "helpful" I use CCleaner to wipe stuff. use it to wipe history, and do like a 3 wipe of your free disk space. it's free via cnet. then use avira antivirus and do a scan. that thing works well. maybe even download a p2p blocker and so you can see other IP addresses. i am 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999% sure you are 100% fine