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Two Questions

  • 24 October 2012
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Question 1: I notice that some secure sights, e.g. my bank, have a login for name then another page for password and once entered the Chrome turns green with lock.  Other sights with HTTPS to not turn green.  Can someone please explain this to me.
 
Question 2:  I am in a big fight with my ISP.  I have written my state corporation commission and the FCC and the Better Bidness Buttholes about them.  I have sent my ISP copies of these complaints to my ISP.  Now I think my ISP is monitoring me or my keystrokes cuz funny things are happening.  Now all of a sudden when I'm at a government sight, the screen starts jumping and skanking all around.  It reminds me of the old jitter bug that was a spyware or virus thing a year or 3 ago.  Webroot does not pick anything up, but I use its Clean UP feature, and the Internet Options Delete, and my old Tracks Eraser to dump off all my cookies, log files, and other miscellaneous crap.
 
Is there any way to tell if my actual ISP is monitoring my traffic, keystrokes or etc?
 
thanks for some help,
 
Ch 4 t
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Best answer by JimM 24 October 2012, 07:42

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Question 1: I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "turn green," but the lock will only show up on HTTPS sites by default.  It depends on how your configuration is set up.  If you open up Webroot, and go to "View/Edit Protected Websites," you'll see settings for HTTPS and HTTP sites.  You could change HTTP sites to have the same protection as HTTPS if you would prefer, but otherwise, it seems most likely that one of the pages you are visiting is HTTPS and another is standard HTTP.  Therefore the lock only shows up on one of them and not the other.  If you're positive that you're on an HTTPS site, and you don't see the padlock, I'd like to know which browser you're using and the version of that browser.  We'd also probably want to move the case into the support system to obtain logs to get a clearer picture of the operating environment we're dealing with.  Does the site actually say "HTTPS" in the address bar?  Some browsers these days will intentionally obfuscate that, and you don't really know if it's HTTP or HTTPS.
 
Question 2: An ISP woudn't need to be on your computer, or have anything abnormal running on your computer, in order to monitor your activity, so it wouldn't be giving away "hints" like the ones you're talking about.  Probably this is due to other causes.  An ISP in a uniquely excellent position to be able to do that already, since anything you are doing is passing through them, be it incoming or outgoing traffic, and they could analyze it without needing to interact with your computer itself.  However, if they were intentionally messing with your computer's operation somehow in a manner that was designed to inflict damage or cause you some kind of undue mental anguish, that sort of action would most likely be illegal.  I doubt that's the case.  For one thing, we'd most likely be picking up on it already since it would require some kind of code to be running on your end to get a browser to behave oddly (assuming again, this is the ISP and not just the site you're on being coded to have your window act crazy or some kind of browser or hardware problem).  For another thing, ISP's are typically very, very responsible.  For anyone at an ISP to attempt to hack your computer would be highly, highly unusual, to such an extent, you could call it unheard-of.  Even monitoring your computer's traffic without your consent and without a court order is illegal last I checked.
 
Nevertheless, if you're experiencing some sort of weird behavior, and you're concerned we may have missed something somehow, we'd be happy to check.  You'd want to put in a support ticket so we can manually check to make sure whether or not something nefarious is running on your machine.  WSA itself does a great job at this on its own, but we do have threat experts on staff in case you'd like us to take a look manually as well.  It needs to be a support ticket however so we can take a look at the Webroot logs.

*I replied outside of staffed hours at about 11:30PM, but there is no guarantee of replies outside of staffed hours.  I'll be back in the office M-F, at about 8AM MST until 5PM MST, Monday through Friday.  Please see the Community Guidelines for staffed hours.*

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