Mark Twain wrote:
While checking the news I clicked an ad
by mistake and got a warning that a site
had been blocked by Avast. Then I got this
later on:

http://i63.tinypic.com/5etipy.jpg

I checked my security settings:

http://i64.tinypic.com/2zhldh3.jpg


Should I be concerned?

Robert

The first picture is "scareware" written in poor English.
That's how you tell what kind of people are involved.
Nobody seems to be able to get an English speaker to
review their "innovative" advertising scares.

The red color tells you it's scareware. Your AV shouldn't
pull tricks like that to scare you. A regular sized dialog
box is plenty scary enough, without the color scheme.

*******

You should check your Adobe Flash and make sure it's
up to date.

Adobe Flash is normally set to auto-update itself.
Check the version in the small box on the upper right,
against the version table below.

http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/about/

If for some reason, Adobe Flash had stopped receiving updates,
these are the links I used on April 22, 2018. The first one
is for Firefox or SeaMonkey, otherwise known as the NPAPI plugin.

http://fpdownload.adobe.com/get/flas...ash_player.exe

This download is for "Chrome look-alikes" such as SRWare Iron.
This is the PPAPI plugin. The actual Google Chrome browser,
downloads its own private PPAPI plugin, and doesn't use this.
You are unlikely to need this one. The Firefox one though, above,
is more likely to help.

https://fpdownload.adobe.com/get/fla...ayer_ppapi.exe

I noticed a couple of incidents just before April 22, where
I suspected my Flash was letting garbage in. And so I updated
it. And that has stopped.

And don't click on stuff, OK ? :-)

You will want to clean out the cache on whatever
browser you did that on. I like to search on "cache"
or "_cache" to see if the cache is actually clean. I think
Firefox cleans up pretty well. SeaMonkey on the other
hand, does not, and you clean that one manually.

If you don't clean the cache, the red screen can come back
when Firefox gets in a rush to "restore the session". So
when you're exited from Firefox, you clean out the cache
folder.

And I've tried scanning the cache files, and scanning
uncovers nothing. Which suggests when a file in the
cache is loaded, it "reaches out" and gets infected
code to put the red screen back.

Sometimes the in-browser "cleaning" menu is compromised,
or the file in the cache has a way of blocking cleanup,
and that's one reason I like to verify visually that
I've cleaned it out.

I didn't get your red screen, but I did have some more
serious symptoms (computer would not shut down on command,
Task Manager was clear). I restored from a backup for that
one, and didn't take chances.

Paul