Thursday, October 1, 2009

Chrome Downloads

Ok, so now I know of some interesting implications of Chrome's handling of downloads.  I downloaded Chrome a week ago or so, I am trying to optimize my workflow and use Google docs, et al. So far it's been great, but it scared me for about an hour or so.  I was searching for a key for CopyTrans and I hit a site called wareseeker.com and downloaded what turned out was supposed to be a keygen.  Thankfully I was thinking and I scanned the executable before running it, and you guessed it, wareseeker.com gave me warez!  I deleted the file and ran a sweep of my laptop using the new Microsoft Security Essentials (which works very well by the way) and killed the virus.  Being a paranoid person, I ran the check again and much to my surprise found the virus again in chrome.  I panicked, told the scanner to delete it, then ran the scanner again.  Same result.  Apparently Chrome keeps a compressed copy of things you download in the cache, luckily I was just able to delete the file with no ill effects so far.  The lesson here seems to be double check for cached files and stay a way from questionably legal websites, which I will stay FAR away from from now on.

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