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Websites I've never visited are in my Chrome history. Mac virus? Corrupt plugin?

4 points by justindocanto ↗ HN
I was looking through my browsing history just a few minutes ago, to find a site i was looking at yesterday, when i notice a handful of hulu.com video pages in my history that ive never viewed. I actually cant remember the last time I've been on hulu.com (as in months) so it looks like something fishy is going on here...

See here: http://imgur.com/M4Oul

The real mind-f__k is I was using my computer while these pages were visited. Meaning, it's not from somebody else (eg. my girlfriend being sneaky). I can't seem to find anything on google about this.

Before it gets mentioned: Yes I was on facebook a lot. It's saturday and i pulled an all-nighter coding the night before. Give me a break ;)

Anyway... I'm pretty OCD about tabs/windows and saw no hulu.com videos open while I was on yesterday. I had music playing, meaning the volume was up, so I would have heard any videos playing if they played (I would assume they'd play if it was something trying to game views)

The device in question is an Early 2010 MacBook Pro running Mac OSX 10.8.2. My Google Chrome version is 22.0.1229.94

I am using the following Chrome Plugins: - Reddit Enhancement Suite 4.1.3 - Hacker Face 5.8 - PageSpeed Insights (by Google) 2.0.2.2

I find it hard to believe one of those plugins would cause it, but you never know. Maybe my mac has a virus I've never heard of? Maybe it's something stupid obvious and I'm overlooking it? I couldn't find anything on google about my problem.

Any ideas HN? What could cause this? And what can I do to dig deeper to see where these page views originated

Thanks in advance. =)

13 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 43.8 ms ] thread
pyrotechnick
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Browser_Sync

https://www.google.com/settings/activity

justindocanto
I mentioned this above, but...

I looked into it, and this is definitely not the case.

Google Chrome hasn't synced for over a week: http://imgur.com/WmrAS

And my laptop is the only one thats accessed my account all month: http://imgur.com/NeL01

hiddenstage
Go to gmail. On the bottom click on Other Sessions or something like that (can't remember the wording). It should show all IPs associated with the account.

Chrome Sync is notoriously bad at reporting what it is or isn't doing, at least in my experiences.

If I were you I'd turn on 2-factor auth and forget about it.

justindocanto
I havent been syncing my bookmarks on any devices. I wasn't signed into chrome the whole week before, so unfortunately this wasn't the case.
bulltale
Some ideas:

- Do the bookmarks have any extra info? For example the links to the HULU pages. Do they contain parameters (such as ?campaign=fb) which could point to the origin of the bookmarks? - Try to reproduce. Remove/save some bookmarks, and visit the same pages you visited before (esp. FB) and see if the bookmarks reoccur. - Use little netstat to monitor connections. See if you spot something odd. But this is an time-intensive method.

It can be spooky when odd things like these happen on your pc. But many times it is just a confluence of circumstances. You could see this as an incident - when it reoccurs, then you have something to research. At that moment, put it on superuser or the likes. Probably you get better answers then here :)

justindocanto
The bookmarks have no variables at the end, unfortunately. All the URLs look like this: http://www.hulu.com/watch/419957

I've visited everything i visited up until a few hours before this happened & nothing. Not a single video or random url popping up in my history.

I dont have any other devices that were even on at this time, so it wasnt google chrome history syncing from another one of my devices.

One thing that has been brought up is seeing what devices are synced with my google account.. and seeing if somebody else somehow has their browser (and their history) synced with my account... and thats why it's showing up. I doubt it because im pretty protective of my credentials, but you never know.

I'll report back what I find.

justindocanto
Looked into it, and this is definitely not the case.

Google Chrome hasn't synced for over a week: http://imgur.com/WmrAS

And my laptop is the only one thats accessed my account all month: http://imgur.com/NeL01

justindocanto
You're probably right in saying 'when things happen to our comps... its spooky... but more or less not a big deal'. But it just happened again so I'm doing locking down my google account and then reinstalling Mountain Lion from scratch to be safe. As a developer, i have way too much of my clients stuff on here to risk anybody being on my comp, even if it's a false alarm. Thanks for the input though.
antoinec
Schizophrenia ?
justindocanto
The redditor in me laughed. The HN user in my wants to be able to downvote you.
ogwyther
Have you considered that you might have Chrome Sync logged in on another device?
justindocanto
I dont watch hulu.com videos period. And i smash hard drives to pieces before throwing away old computers. I dont see how this would be possible. Maybe somebody I dont know somehow managed to get my login, sync it with chrome, and watched hulu.com? I find that highly unlikely... but I'll try to see if i can find a spot within my google account to see all the devices i have chrome synced with.
jimbobob
It could be due to the Hulu videos loading in your Facebook News feed. This seems likely as the Hulu videos are interspersed with Facebook page loads.