I’m seeing Trojan:JS/Flafisi.D detections and Tech Support Scams on the Edge browser Start page

Anonymous

Update: A member of Microsoft's MSN Engineering Team (RodrigoLode(MSFT) has responded to acknowledge the malvertising issues associated with MSN portal. They have also requested ***" If anyone is still experiencing this, please reply here."***For more specifics on information requested please refer to the reply from Rodrigo at the following link:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/protect/forum/protect_defender-protect_scanning-windows_10/im-seeing-trojanjsflafisid-detections-and-tech/8fbe8eaf-1af0-4e76-9ab0-57828f631a5f?page=7&messageId=3661a31c-2019-4808-a88b-283919038cc1

In addition to reporting the fake pop-ups themselves I would advise that you take note if there is a significant loss of performance on computer after encountering, in particular, the fake Adobe Flash Player update. If things seem sluggish you may have been subject to one of the more prevalent malicious activities known as crypto-mining/coin mining.

Invisible resource thieves: The increasing threat of cryptocurrency miners

https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2018/03/13/invisible-resource-thieves-the-increasing-threat-of-cryptocurrency-miners/

Especially important to report these occurrences or any other odd behaviors after using MSN website.

Moderator Edit: Provided update.

Just reading the “Comey trolls Trump” article on the Edge Start page and this pops up:

This one was easy to handle because it was just the old-fashioned dialog loop based scam:

– but what’s coming next Microsoft?

GreginMich

[Original Title: Surprised again]

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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386 answers

Rob Koch 26,075 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator

2018-02-28T17:35:16+00:00

Hey Greg,

I've seen reports of those coming from any page that includes advertising, including MSN which is the source of the default page for Edge as well as IE 11 as I recall.

I turned off these start pages in favor of a blank page immediately myself, not for this reason, but rather simply because I don't like the lag and noise these create when I open a browser.

I did have difficulty figuring out how to stop them with new tabs in IE 11 though, until I found out there was a separate control for this within the Internet Options - Tabs section on the General tab.

As Julia often mentions as well, I've found that ad blocking is the most effective method to stop these, since it's the advertising networks who distribute the initial scripts and typically don't vet their advertisers well if at all. What a surprise huh?

Rob
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