Be careful!

I would like to tell you a story that happened to me about a month ago. It all started when I was sitting in front of my computer, as usual, browsing various sites on the Internet.

At some point, a pop-up ad appeared on the monitor with a picture of a smiling man on a black background and the caption:

"Congratulations! You've been selected as the winner!"

The ad popped up on one of the sites I frequent. I didn't pay much attention to it and turned it off.When I went to the next page, this ad popped up again. It repeated itself on the next few pages until I got annoyed and turned off the page I was viewing.

Things started to get weird when I went to YouTube. Normally no pop-ups appear on this site, at least I haven't encountered them here. However, now just this pop-up popped up. That's when I got concerned. I started going to different sites, even Google - the same thing popped up every time.

I got scared that my computer had some kind of virus, so I scanned it.

After a long and tedious process, the antivirus showed nothing - the computer seemed fine. However, the freaking adware wouldn't go away, so I reset the machine.

Unfortunately to no avail, because the damn thing was still there. It was already annoying, especially the smiling guy who I could describe as a "wolf in sheep's clothing". There was nothing warm or friendly about him and I could have sworn his smile was fake. I didn't know what to think about it, but it occurred to me that the ad would disappear if I clicked on it and then turned off the page. Clicking closed the ad and opened a new tab with nothing more than a download link. Normally I would just turn it off, but I noticed that the file was called "prize.rar". As far as I know, .rar files are harmless as long as you don't unzip them. This got me curious.

I downloaded the file to examine it and scanned it with antivirus, which detected nothing. I looked at the contents of the file through WinRAR and found only a text file called "Prize.txt".

A text file? That's it? Text files can't possibly be infected, I thought. Maybe I was wrong, but since the anti-virus didn't detect anything, I unzipped it and opened it.

As I expected, the file contained only a short text, but I will never forget that feeling in my stomach.

Congratulations, you have been selected as this month's lucky winner! The prize has been prepared for you and will be delivered to the address provided.

Below was my exact address. A few seconds later someone started banging on the door. I sat still for several minutes while the pounding didn't stop. I don't know how much time passed until it was over.

As I mentioned earlier, this happened a month ago and nothing similar has happened since. I, however, am still scared, knowing that whoever it was knows where I live. So I thought,

I'd like to share this story with you to warn you about the adware. If you decide to download this file, make sure you have the door locked and don't open it. Whatever was on the other side certainly did not have good intentions.