Dangerous Photo and Video Hosting

[TheWolfe]

In the last month or two my smart phone (an LG G4) has been just not quite right. It's been a bit laggy and some of the apps have frozen from time to time. A few weeks ago a window came up over my charging screen that started showing me apps and offered me an option to pay to shut it off. I Googled and found out that it was malware and how to remove it. Today the phone froze, shut down and then went into a boot loop, which means it starts to boot, then shuts down and tries to reboot itself over and over. As of the time that I'm typing this, I do not have a functioning cellphone.

It's very common when visiting photo and video hosting links in the forums here to have my browser hijacked. All of the image hosts like Imagebam and Imagebox do this. Sometimes it's triggered by tapping the image to save it and other times I just have to touch my screen to scroll and it opens up new browser windows, causes my phone to vibrate and sometimes takes me into the Google Play Store to present apps that it wants me to install. Most often these hijackings display fake system messages telling me that my phone has viruses and that I should click the link they show to fix them, which is a scam. Some of the video hosts will do this, too. It doesn't happen on PC but all the time on my phone. I never run into this type of malicious hijacking anywhere else in the course of using my phone so it would seem that the problems that I've run into today most likely have come from the websites forum members use to host photos and videos.

I'm passing along this info just to remind everyone to be careful if they do any activity on this forum via smart phone. I'm making a trip to the phone store shortly and I'll have them do a factory reset on my phone (I can't do it at home because my carrier's firmware blocks that) which should get it back to normal. Then I'll have to reinstall all my apps and start over from scratch. Luckily I have all my photos and videos (personal and L&C) stored separately on the memory card which I've removed from the phone to keep them safe. Take precautions and avoid viewing the material shared here via smart phone. I don't know how anyone can benefit from doing this to my phone but it would seem that one or more of the hosting sites used here engages in unscrupulous activities. Even though this doesn't seem to affect PC access of their sites, they may still be installing malware in the form of browser extensions on your computer. Please exercise extreme caution with all free photo and video hosts.