Hi, When trying to visit a site that has been prohibited by my HOSTS file (say when a pop-up appears, the content of which has been filtered), Prevx warns me I am about to visit a site which is on my HOSTS file. Now I can understand why I would want to be alerted if my HOSTS file was the default that came with Windows - a malicious process would have modified it. However, as I am using the MVPS hosts file, this isn't really necessary. Another irk is that if I am using Firefox with ten tabs open and click to close the window, instead of just closing that tab it will close the whole of FF down, with no option to save my tabs. Anyway to turn off Prevx monitoring my HOSTS file? Cheers.
Hello, When you receive this warning, you should have a button "Ignore" which will then allow you to add an automatic override for that website to be able to visit it without warnings in the future. Regarding the "Close" behavior - Prevx intentionally closes the entire browser instead of just closing the current tab because when a malicious website is visited, it is extremely likely that it came from somewhere that could re-spawn/re-open the same website again (either accidentally or intentionally) so the safest approach is to close the entire browser. Let me know if you have any questions!
Thanks for the reply. I have an idle question though - if a site is blocked by my HOSTS file, what is the point of the ignore button, if my HOSTS file will block the site anyway? If it's blocked by my hosts file then thats it - the site is blocked. Why the Prevx warning? Thanks!
Prevx is warning that the destination address of the website is being redirected elsewhere. It is true that in your case it is being redirected to localhost and therefore being blocked, but, for instance, if malware had set up a fake website which would actually serve from your local PC or another PC on your network, it could phish you directly even though you would initially think it was blocked. The same happens with other "conventional" hosts file directions (i.e. redirecting Google to VirusWebsite) which SafeOnline also blocks. Hope that helps!
