Weird tech glitch or malware?
I've been working on a complex little corner of the tree and had multiple tabs open. Everything has been working normally the past couple of hours, then out of the blue I went to click between tabs and the tab I clicked on started to refresh, not uncommon. But instead of refreshing, a file auto-dowloaded.
I went to my downloads folder and there was a file labelled "Authorise" it was 0KB. I didn't notice what the file type was, but the thumbnail looked like a system file.
I'm not in the habit of opening files that auto-download, so I popped it in the trash and closed the tab. But when I went to another tab the situation repeated.
I deleted the second file, emptied my trash and quit the browser. Now everything seems normal.
If I leave tabs open over night, I've been signed out and asked to sign in again. But NEVER in all the years I've been using FamilySearch have I had a file auto-download. I didn't have any other websites open, only FS.
Anyone know what might have happened? Should I be concerned?
Answers
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Yesterday, there was a banner announcing overnight maintenance and advising that some things might not work as expected during the maintenance.
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Hopefully, a moderator will investigate this specific issue to provide reassurance about the possibility of malware involvement.
In general terms, I experienced problems this morning (BST), especially in getting "Something Went Wrong" pages every time I tried to open a record / source. As Áine suggests, the problems were probably just related to FS maintenance work. I don't bother to report any glitches experienced on Mondays as I've come to expect they will happen and will usually be quite temporary.
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Thank you both for your insights. I did see the notice of maintenance banner but I'm AEST and didn't take note of the time conversion, so I'm not sure of the overlap. Though shortly after posting this thread, I did get "Something Went Wrong" notices when trying to view records/sources as Paul did, so maybe it was connected to that.
I'm starting to wonder if a combination of the work happening at Family Search's end and possibly a quite full cache at my end, caused a cookie to glitch and download front-end rather than backend, if that makes sense? Hopefully a moderator will be able to give some more clarity.
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