5 easy ways to know your computer has been hacked

Hacking, most of the times, isn’t personal. Hackers carry out massive campaigns and you might just be unlucky

When hackers come after you, they want your personal information. They want control of your devices. They want your money. They want just about anything they can get their hands on.

Hacking personal digital devices is a serious issue in cybersecurity, though it’s not always as threatening as you might imagine. In some cases, the legitimate concern is warranted. This article focuses on five ways to tell if your computer has been hacked, courtesy of online casino Australia.

1 – Ransomware messages

One of the worst messages anyone can see on their computer is a sudden screen take-over telling them all their data is encrypted and asking for a payment to unlock it. Ransomware is huge! After a slight decrease in activity in 2017, ransom-asking programs have come roaring back. Billions of dollars in productivity is being lost and billions in ransom are being paid. Small businesses, large businesses, hospitals, police stations and entire cities are being brought to a halt by ransomware. About 50% of the victims pay the ransom, ensuring that it isn’t going away anytime soon.

2 – Fake antivirus message

You get a popup message on your computer or mobile device that it is infected. The pop-up message pretends to be an antivirus scanning product and is purporting to have found a dozen or more malware infections on your computer. Although this isn’t near as popular as it used to be, fake antivirus warning messages are still a situation that has to be dealt with in the right way.

They can occur because of two reasons: Either your system is already compromised or it is not compromised beyond the pop-up message. Hope for the latter. These types of fake antivirus messages usually have figured out a way to lock up your browser so that you can’t get out of the fake message without killing the browser and restarting it.

3 – Unwanted browser toolbars

This is a common sign of exploitation: Your browser has multiple new toolbars with names that seem to indicate the toolbar is supposed to help you. Unless you recognize the toolbar as coming from a well-known vendor, it’s time to dump the bogus toolbar. They could affect your gambling experience at sports betting Australia.

4 – Internet searches redirected

Many hackers make their living by redirecting your browser somewhere you don’t want to go. The hacker gets paid by getting your clicks to appear on someone else’s website. They often don’t know that the clicks to their site are from malicious redirection.

You can often spot this type of malware by typing a few related, very common words (for example, “puppy” or “goldfish”) into internet search engines and checking to see whether the same websites appear in the results — almost always with no relevance to your terms. Unfortunately, many of today’s redirected internet searches are well hidden from the user through use of additional proxies, so the bogus results are never returned to alert the user.

5 – Frequent, random popups

This popular sign that you’ve been hacked is also one of the more annoying ones. When you’re getting random browser pop-ups from websites that don’t normally generate them, your system has been compromised. I’m constantly amazed by which websites, legitimate and otherwise, can bypass your browser’s anti-pop-up mechanisms. It’s like battling email spam, but worse.