What’s wrong with these pictures?
The Chrome one looks like it wants to enter you in a contest. The Edge popup is trying to be helpful, and install the Adobe Flash player for your browser, so that you can view the website you are trying to visit.
Both of these are malware installers. If you see one of these (or something similar) pop up in your browser, do not click Ok. Do not click Install.
Misery and gloom lie on that path.
Close your browser by clicking the X in the top right corner. Don’t click minimize (the little underline looking thing). Click the X.
Always ensure your antivirus package is up to date. There are many good packages, and Windows even comes with a pretty good package built in. Most packages, if not all, update their definitions regularly, with some of them updating multiple times per day. Take this basic step to protect yourself. Please.
Do backups. Don’t just be of the mindset, “It won’t happen to me!”. There are multi-million dollar companies that pay people to safeguard their data, and it happens to them. Just do regular backups, please. If you do get infected, it could be the backup that saves the thousands of pictures you have, or the receipts, or the tax returns, or whatever you have stored. A protected cloud backup is a good choice, or if you don’t like cloud for some reason, an offline backup with an external hard drive is another solid choice.
If you get a phone call from “Bob” or some other random name, claiming to be from Microsoft, hang up. It’s a scammer. He’ll claim that your machine is infected, your internet connection will be turned off, and the sky is falling, unless you give him your bank information.
If you get a phone call from someone at the Social Security Administration, hang up. This person will be claiming that your Social Security Number has a judgement against (not making this up). In order to not send agents to your house to arrest you, he wants your credit card info, or for you to go to Walmart and buy a bunch of iTunes cards.
Don’t post your phone number in public places online, lest you suddenly be inundated with random calls from, ummm, seedy individuals.
Let’s be safe out there, friends and neighbors.