My son don't listen to any security advice at all

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He just came to me and said his friend sent him a link and he clicked on it even though i told him over and over again not to click links from steam friends even if they are your friend in real life.

Well he didn't listen to my sage advice and he clicked it thinking it was a legit steam site. he said he was in steam friends talking to his friends in the steam friends list and he thought it was odd that the link brought up his browser and got the web page saying you are leaving steam. Instead of bringing it in the steam client.

He said he closed out of it but still said he got a virus from that page i told him he had to click on go to external site because the steam redirect page will not give you a virus. He said he didn't enter the site or his steam user name and password. So i think he did but cleared his browser history as it was empty. So i told him to scan his pc change his password to be on the safe side.

The site steampoweredforums.***/ is easy to see is fake.

He is still insisting that the redirect page for steam gave him a virus. So help me prove him wrong. That the steam redirect page can not give you a virus from a page it is redirecting you to if you don't click continue to external site.

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引用自 Mischievous Sly Succubus：

引用自 For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge：

Yea I'm going to format his pc and not even back up none of his personal files and reinstall windows and he won't be allowed on it for awhile. He is 17 he should of known better.

Before you do this, you may not be able to even do that much if those files are infected either, if this is a virus, even personal files may be corrupted. Take this as a note for the future from someone who does do cyber security for a side project now and then. Even the smallest of viruses, droppers, can hide in plain sight on your PC, in personal files, in pictures, in mods and game folders, their designed to wait till activation and when they do, they steal your data, or accounts.

Some can wait for 4 years at tops before turning on and at that stage, there's no saving anything on the PC because everything is already likely been taken over to some degree like a worm does.

If anything is savable, I'd just back up his cloud saves as Steam will virus check those for you and do a clean reset, its not the most loved option but its the only course you may have if you can't locate the virus in of itself, so its likely a spyware, dropper or one that cloaked itself rather damn well.

Yea that is why i said i'm not backing up any of his personal files it's all being deleted. Even pics of his friends and girlfriend are not being saved and will be formatted when i use diskpart. Nothing is going to be saved when i format it.

[Morkonan]

引用自 For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge：

...
Yea that is why i said i'm not backing up any of his personal files it's all being deleted. Even pics of his friends and girlfriend are not being saved and will be formatted when i use diskpart. Nothing is going to be saved when i format it.

Low-Level "nuke it from orbit."

Though, I'd get whatever pics and plain-text you could off of it - You don't have to be brutal, just memorable and instructive. :) Just don't tell him and break it out later when he's done sulking.

Don't allow a darn other thing on the network to accept a connection from his machine, though...

"I'm sorry, but your connection attempt to "Family Movie Archive" at "Home Network" has been refused. Pool's closed."

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引用自 Mischievous Sly Succubus：

引用自 For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge：

Well when a 17 year old turns everything off because he don't like seeing that this site is blocked in big red letters and comes down in the middle of the night and resets the router so he can get to discord and twitter and facebook and tick tock and ph etc. And i have to keep setting up the router it gets old quick and tiresome and you get to the point of ♥♥♥♥ it.

Sounds like he's constantly getting into trouble with traders and scammers, at that point I do get where your coming from.

He don't use the steam community market. He only has 8 games and none of them use the market. But i don't want him on social media or adult websites till he is 18. He clicked on a link in steam his real life friend that he goes to school sent him. This is how he screwed up.

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引用自 Midori：

Just gonna say (and it's going to be hard to convince you probably) there's little to no chance his photos are infected with anything especially just from visiting a Steam phishing site and formatting without backing them up would be pointless, just don't back up .exe files/programs, everything else is fine...

And you should give your son a break, why blame him and not the person who sent the shady URL?

Oh i know pics jpg jpeg png bmp gif files can't have a virus and movies avi mpg mkv etc also can't have viruses but i was going to use it as a teaching tool that when your not carful you can lose things you want to keep and that you should always back up and then back up the back up.

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引用自 Morkonan：

引用自 For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge：

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Yea that is why i said i'm not backing up any of his personal files it's all being deleted. Even pics of his friends and girlfriend are not being saved and will be formatted when i use diskpart. Nothing is going to be saved when i format it.

Low-Level "nuke it from orbit."

Though, I'd get whatever pics and plain-text you could off of it - You don't have to be brutal, just memorable and instructive. :) Just don't tell him and break it out later when he's done sulking.

Don't allow a darn other thing on the network to accept a connection from his machine, though...

"I'm sorry, but your connection attempt to "Family Movie Archive" at "Home Network" has been refused. Pool's closed."

yea i know pics and movies can't hold a virus though i kinda remember a long time ago there was a virus people was embedding in pictures and or videos. But them are from places you had to download them. But pics he took with his phone are safe but instead of deleting them i'll save them to a flash drive and then tell him that i had to delete them also to be safe. Then later on hand him the flash drive.

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引用自 Midori：

引用自 For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge：

Oh i know pics jpg jpeg png bmp gif files can't have a virus and movies avi mpg mkv etc also can't have viruses but i was going to use it as a teaching tool that when your not carful you can lose things you want to keep and that you should always back up and then back up the back up.

Maybe you could reveal to him that his files are gone, wait for him to reflect, and then tell him just this once and never again you saved his files. That's what my dad did the first time I screwed up the family PC and it stuck with me. Just a thought, he just made a mistake after all.

yea i was going to save them to a flash drive then hand it to him at a later date.

[Electric Cupcake]

Directly embedding malware in media files is rare.

Some early virii took advantage of the OS hiding the file extension by default and getting people to click an executable script by using a false file extension with the real one hidden.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZDiQczOsdc

And, of course, Spy Pixels in email are still a problem for clients that display embeds automatically.

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引用自 Electric Cupcake：

Directly embedding malware in media files is rare.

Some early virii took advantage of the OS hiding the file extension by default and getting people to click an executable script by using a false file extension with the real one hidden.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZDiQczOsdc

And, of course, Spy Pixels in email are still a problem for clients that display embeds automatically.

I remember that virus and it was a terrible one.

[Morkonan]

引用自 For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge：

..
yea i know pics and movies can't hold a virus though i kinda remember a long time ago there was a virus people was embedding in pictures and or videos. But them are from places you had to download them.

They can't...until they can. :)

Just from memory, one famous "image" format that could be used to carry bad-stuff was .png. That was years ago, though. But, a lot of image formats are not necessarily just "image" formats. The most infamous, in the past, is the .ico. Then, there's file types that are capable of displaying an internal thumbnail so that they look like an image. The most common of those that's corrupted is .iso, I think.

And, ALL commercial proprietary formats like anything from Adobe or Microsoft are always suspect until they are cleared. (pdf, .doc, etc) The .pdf script exploiting was rampant in the old days.

Oh, and the old trick of hiding an ico, iso, dll, in a RAR or ZIP... WinRar at least allowed users to select to unpack executables or block them.

Also -

Files can contain things that the OS will act on in unusual ways that may expose it to vulnerabilities. There was an exploit years ago involving UTF/Unicode encoding being used for meta info in image formats, for instance. The standard Windows OS is designed to access that, but when dealing with trying to parse certain text encoding schemes, it would open up the system to further attacks and vulnerabilities. So, while not a direct piece of malware, that's an example of something being used to make a system vulnerable to other malware that is active or could be activated.

In essence, an innocent .jpg of a puppy could have UTF-16 (IIRC) in the meta-info that would trigger a stack overlfow/memory exploit that some other piece of software was waiting on to then exploit. Tricksey. (Since fix't)

ie: Ain't no place safe, so we may as well just give up and let the sharks eat us...

But pics he took with his phone are safe but instead of deleting them i'll save them to a flash drive and then tell him that i had to delete them also to be safe. Then later on hand him the flash drive.

Good call. He'll be thankful for that and it's a good "Dad" move. :)

[Morkonan]

引用自 Spencer：

The touch screen has damaged a generation.

You are absolutely correct.

A couple of days ago I read a very in-depth article about this. Sorry I can't remember the link.

The issue was that while the up-and-coming generation can Google very efficiently and can even make great pics with AI generators or write papers with ChatGPT... they don't really know "why" or "how" any of that works.

It's like being a great race-car driver, but not knowing how to change the oil in an automobile.

[Y1N9]

Take away his keyboard and mouse, glue the usb ports shut. Problem solved. No need to thank me.

[Raziel]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2urR0J0kB28&ab_channel=ReactionVideos

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引用自 Raziel：

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2urR0J0kB28&ab_channel=ReactionVideos

No! That solves nothing.

[[N]ebsun]

引用自 For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge：

since his pc is already infected what more harm can it do

As per your virustotal report
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/e50e15c9bbe4b0eee15d2c3f441a31904104a82becf5cda3e206560afc37063d

It's detected by virustotal as a PHISHING site
change password and secure the account - if the kid entered their password / logged in, then the scammers are already in the account

[Thadeus]

引用自 For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge：

引用自 Raziel：

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2urR0J0kB28&ab_channel=ReactionVideos

No! That solves nothing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g01_MH5O_J8