'Error # 3658fa2deb39539' Pop-Ups

The 'Error # 3658fa2deb39539' pop-ups are hoaxes that ask the victim to contact a con artist pretending to be a support technician. While the fraudsters can use these encounters for different purposes, most attacks culminate in installing backdoor vulnerabilities for controlling your PC or requesting money in exchange for scamware. Minimize any exposure to sites launching these threats and use appropriate PC security software to clean the 'Error # 3658fa2deb39539' pop-ups from your browser if need be.

Why It Pays to Know Your Error Code Formats

Although they lack the media publicity of high-profile corporate espionage or some of the larger, file-encrypting extortion campaigns, basic phishing attacks are maintaining a strong presence in certain domains on the Internet. The majority of these attacks don't try to compromise specific targets and will compromise random Web traffic merely after encouraging clicks through pretending to offer illicit downloads or streams. The 'Error # 3658fa2deb39539' pop-ups are a prototypical format of such campaigns and provide clear demonstrations of how to identify the core fraudulence.

Malware researchers are finding at least two, distinct versions of the 'Error # 3658fa2deb39539' pop-ups loading through websites such as the confirmed-compromised denicedaccess33321x00.com domain. In one, the HTML window claims that your PC is compromised by either spyware or a virus, while the second variant claims only that your browser is under a blockade for unspecified reasons. In either case, the 'Error # 3658fa2deb39539' pop-ups ask the reader to contact their phone number for technical support.

Any in-depth analysis of the contents of these attacks exposes the fake nature of their error code immediately, which isn't part of a legitimate OS or Web browser warning system. Other clues malware analysts are pointing out include the cautionary advice, borrowed from previous phishing attacks, that the 'Error # 3658fa2deb39539' pop-ups may prevent the victims from restarting their computers or closing their browser, by claiming that doing so can damage the operating system.

An Escalation of Errors that's Difficult to Walk Away From

The 'Error # 3658fa2deb39539' pop-ups promote fake technical support hotlines to acquire access to the users' money, information, or even their PCs. The majority of these attacks as analyzed by malware researchers consist of attempts to sell fake security products or system repair services, which can entail gaining access to your credit card information or connecting to your PC through a remote desktop feature. The latter also can help threat actors install scamware like Antivirus 10, or take complete control over the computer with a backdoor Trojan.

While specific websites have connections to the 'Error # 3658fa2deb39539' pop-ups, malware researchers have yet to affiliate any individual brands of Web-browsing software with these hoaxes. Disabling scripts, blocking advertisements, and having URL-monitoring security tools can disable these threats. After being in contact with them, you also may wish to consider deleting temporary files, such as your browser's cache, to remove the 'Error # 3658fa2deb39539' pop-ups and other traces of harmful content.

Unless they pair themselves with other threats, in future attacks, the 'Error # 3658fa2deb39539' pop-ups aren't a significant hazard to PC users educated on proper error handling and Web security practices. However, they do represent a potential menace to anyone thinking that a random website's pop-up is trustworthy.