Are You Sure?

Like a true member of “old guard” I occasionally touch hosts file in order to do custom redirects. On Windows 7 it is annoying experience to edit this file. First you need to open it directly in program since it doesn’t have proper extension. After short edit you need to save it and, of course, it is protected file. So you need to open another instance of notepad, this time with administrative privileges…

Few weeks after you change this you might get dialog informing you of virus. True, it doesn’t say virus as such but it does look threatening. Warning message even has virus-like name. Only after careful reading it is obvious that two added lines caused this mess:

127.0.0.1	www.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1	ssl.google-analytics.com

Security essentials detected this as a thread and, if you use default disinfect command, it will restore order to your hosts file - by deleting one of those items. Redirecting www.google-analytics.com is a big threat but ssl.google-analytics.com is fair game…

Solution is simple, just select allow option and everything is good once more. At least for a month or so. Then, out of a blue, Security Essentials might warn you about something you did before and you already forgot all about it.