Download Pop-Up
 

Dear LW People

A few days ago, I was downloading, what I thought was, a *.wmv video clip, when I tried to view it using my Windows Media Player V9.0 I got one of those annoying download pop-ups, i.e. the ones that pretend to asked your permission to download something to your HD but will not accept "no" for an answer.

I immediately used Ctrl + Alt + Del, to abandon the "download" process and then used Ad-Aware, Nortons Antivirus and Spybot to see if anything had got onto my HD, thank goodness all three came up clean. I then deleted this video file.

The thing that worries me is that these "drive by pop-ups" are not viruses or ads, are usually hidden in web pages, but this one was in a *.wmv file, and may not be considered as threat by most protection software.

I know that LW disassembles files as they are being downloaded and can spot corrupt files. Therefore, can LW be made to spot when there is a hidden program embedded in a downloading file, which must be malicious otherwise it would not be hidden, so that I, and other users, have the opportunity to kill these downloads?


UK Bob

What you downloaded was an perfectly valid wmv file. The problem is that WMV files allow web sites to pop-up and all kinds of nasty things to happen when you use Windows Media Player to view them. It would be impossible for LimeWire to fix the problem. The only solution that I know of is to not download WMV files. MPG files do not have the ability to imbed webpages, as far as I know.