Ubuntu – Chrome Popup Malware “openadserving.com”

12.10google-chrome

When I'm using Chrome I'm getting fullscreen popup advertising even on sites that I am certain do not have it. I see the web site it is trying to load is "www.openadserving.com" in the status bar.

I suspect this is some kind of browser or OS virus.

How can I deal with this on Ubuntu? Is there some tool I can run to detect the virus? Or can I totally reinstall Chrome somehow?

Best Answer

You haven't provided sufficient information to identify the problem accurately, but the following suggestions may help to identify or even hopefully solve it:

  1. You can open your hosts file (enter this command in terminal: gksu gedit /etc/hosts) and enter this line at the bottom: 127.0.0.1 www.openadserving.com As this will prevent all connection between this site and your computer after restart, this might solve your problem or if it doesn't, then;
  2. You can try a program like Net Activity Viewer to see a list of sites your browser is being connected, and add all undesirable addresses there as in the step 1.
  3. You can try using a utility like hostsblock to prevent connection to such sites in general. (This utility can be downloaded and manually installed from ArchLinux repositories with just one minor modification, replacing pathname /etc/rc.d with /etc/init.d in these files: hostsblock.sh, hostsblock-urlcheck.sh and rc.conf)
Related Question