Earlier this week while waiting for a video to load on Facebook I had my phone taken over by a ransomware popup. Rather than an adorable puppy video, youtube locked up because a popup was telling me that I could be a big winner! The message promised that if I just hit OK I would be entered to win a free iPhone 6s.
I did a little research on the message that displayed on my phone. This is just another scam to get what ends up being large amounts of money out of the user. If I had selected OK I could have experienced anything from unknown charges on my cell phone bill to having my information sold to third party companies, potentially leaving me inundated with phone calls trying to sell me something. Thankfully I immediately closed out of the app I was using and when the message still appeared when I re-launched I simply powered down my phone. Upon restart of my phone and re-launch of the app my phone was back to normal.
While I do wish I could really just win a new Phone, it’s important to always remember that your computer or iOS device will not tell you your a big winner, nor will it tell you that there is suddenly something wrong that requires you call a phone number right away. These are just different forms of ransomware designed to trick you into spending money in some form. Probably the most common is a message to indicate your device has some sort of a virus on it. In some cases just disabling pop-up ads will result in these going away, but not always. The design by nature of this kind of pop-up is that it gives the illusion that your device is locked up and completely unusable until you call a phone number. However, in the majority of cases simply force quitting the browser or application will cause the threat to go away and you have little worry that anything happened to your device provided you did not call the phone number or tap on the message to acknowledge that you saw it.
The proper way to handle these should you find yourself in the situation of seeing one of these message on your iOS device first try to force quit the app by simply double tapping on the home button and then swiping up to shut the app down. If the force quit does not work then you can go to settings and then Safari. From here you can easily clear your browser history and website data and that should take care of things. I did mention earlier in my article that I just shut my phone down. This is also an option but is not the preferred method as there is always a slight chance you could lose data.
Your best defense if you see a pop-up or even get an e-mail from someone you know that seems out of character, whether you’re using an iOS device or a Mac, is do not click on any links that might be within the message. Nine times out of ten if you just force quit the application or delete the e-mail with the suspicious link or instructions you will be just fine and have nothing to worry about. Your best defense is to contact Apple directly or a trusted local repair shop and talk to them directly about helping to solve the problem you may or may not be happening.