when I go to google on firefox and search for a topic, I try to open a website and another website (morsearch, clickkick, etc) will open up instead into a new search engine with the same topic . What is this?
I go to google. I type in "plants". A lot of sites will pop up in google. I click on a site (does not matter which usually). The site will then start to switch to a new url from (click kick, morsearch, etc) turning into a new search engine with the same topic and more options. I never get to the page I want unless I type the url directly into the address box. It always comes back with a search engine. So far I have found this only happens while starting in a search engine. When I get into the actual page, everything is fine. I am using McAfee for security and it hasn't caught a virus or anything yet. Help please! Thanks!
All Replies (4)
Install, update, and run these programs in this order. They are all free for personal use, but some have limited functionality in the "free mode" - but those are features you really don't need to find and remove the problem that you have.
(Not all programs detect the same Malware.)
Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware - http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php
SuperAntispyware - http://www.superantispyware.com/
AdAware - http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/
Spybot Search & Destroy - http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
If these don't find it or can't clear it, post in one of these forums for specialized malware removal help:
http://www.spywarewarrior.com/index.php
http://forum.aumha.org/
http://www.spywareinfoforum.com/
http://bleepingcomputer.com
I did things in the order that the-edmeister suggested.
- Nothing useful from malwareBytes (which did remove 100 non-critical problems and a lot of temporary files)
- Nothing useful from SuperAntiSpyware (which did find some ugly cookies and one more real problem)
- Nothing at all from Lavasoft (as I found later), likely because it was running after the other two.
I left during Lavasoft's comparatively slow scan and came back to find that McAfee had cordoned off the problem for me in the interim. Apparently this was a new variant which had been in the wild only a few days; and McAfee sent an update while I was working on the issue with freely available tools.
As of this morning, AdAware, Malwarebytes and Superantispyware have failed to fix this issue on my computer, even after updating all three. Since the above poster noted it is a new variant, I'm hopeful one of them will be updating their database soon.
No success with Eset Security, Malwarebytes - trying Spybot and if that doesnt work Ad-Aware.
This thing is ugly.
- update*****
None of this worked. I havent noticed the hijacking when using IE, but it still exists with Firefox when I search google or yahoo (havent tried other search engines). Quite annoying.
Modified by ayria