Help me protect my dad from himself

[Traxan]

The other day dad walks in with the phone to his ear, informing me a web page popped up on him advising him to call "Microsoft" at an 844 number. I told him to hang up immediately, ran to his PC and saw it was one of those scam sites that claim you are infected with malware and you need to call "Microsoft" immediately. That was one persistent site. I could not close the page nor Chrome. I had to reset the PC.

I educated him on those sites, told him they were scams and to never call them and stay away from them. Two days later he did it again and clicked on a link that took him to one of those pages. He too had to reboot the PC to get rid of it.

I thought he was smarter than this. Guess not. So what's a really good malware protection program that catches and blocks access to these sites? Webroot? Or something else?

TIA.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Some of those pages are "normal" sites, that get hacked, and the page code delivers malware, if you come to that page via a Google search, for example.

I'm not really aware of an anti-virus package that can prevent them. However, you can use Firefox / Waterfox, with NoScript, to prevent the script-jacking of pages.

 

[Elixer]

Noscript, uBlock, Ghostery can all help, but, I would write on a post-it note and stick that on the monitor to never, ever fall for those scams.

 

[Bernard20]

You can install sandbox to isolate the virus. If you get a virus in your sandbox, you simply delete the contents of that sandbox. Your host machine, software and browser is not touched. It will prevent any virus from effecting your computer data.

 

[John Connor]

Bitdefender Free and Roll Back Rx. With Roll Back Rx you are presented with save states at boot. Use the arrow and Tab keys. Press Home key to enter the menu. Sandboxie may work, but if the user is dumb they will not delete the contents in the sandbox.

 

[PliotronX]

Sometimes those browser messages that lock up the process will slip through adblocking extensions so the only way to significantly reduce risk is to make his account a standard user and use the hosts file to block popular remote access software sites like team viewer, ammyyadmin and aeroadmin. Because even if the crooks remote on, they can cause very limited damage while the most dangerous portion being openly accessible bank statements and other accounting files that the criminals will pilfer.

 

[SpaceBeer]

I have installed Xubuntu on my parents' PC. It has all they need - web browser, libreoffice and skype. And no viruses Also remote control in worse case scenario

 

[lxskllr]

I have installed Xubuntu on my parents' PC. It has all they need - web browser, libreoffice and skype. And no viruses Also remote control in worse case scenario

Yup, I put ubuntu on my mother's machine, and it's already thwarted a 'ms support' call.

 

[lxskllr]

dup

 

[JordanMihailov]

Should adblock help ? Maybe.