Google Hijack Virus

[Jim Kountz]

Well it seems I have got myself a computer virus. I have been able to determine that its referred to as the Google Hijack Virus. What it does is when you do a search using Google you get a normal results page, however none of the links go where they are supposed to go. For a test I searched for wood chisels. Of course I got a gazillion results and I clicked one of the first ones on the list. I think it was from Amazon (go figure). Well instead of taking me to an amazon page I landed on one from The Yellow Pages. Tried another one and went to Chevy.com and yet another one took me to some website promotion site. This happens every time I search for something now.
I tried downloading what were supposed to be a couple of fixes for this thing but nothing works yet. Norton, AVG, Ad-Aware didnt catch it either.
Does anyone know what I can do BESIDES reformatting to kill this stupid thing. It doesnt seem to affect the overall performance or anything just screws up my searches.

HELP!!

[Clay Crocker]

I had a Trojan horse on one of my computers a month or two ago that I could not get rid of. It did the same thing you describe, hijacking web links. My anti virus software could not get rid of it, neither could Spybot or Microsoft Windows Live OneCare safety scanner, they could all see it, they just could not get rid of it, very frustrataing. I was about to reformat the hard drive and re-install Windows when I found Malwarebytes' AntiMalware scanner. Worked like a charm, plus the trial version is free.

http://www.malwarebytes.org/

Hope this helps.

Clay

[Bob Lloyd]

Jim

I had the same thing, could not get rid of it. It did not appear to be malicious just damn annoying. I had a couple of other issues anyway but I did not reformat, I did a PC Restore which returns your computer to its original operating state. i.e. how it came from the factory. You have to back up all your data ( which we all should be doing anyway but don't!) The PC Restore takes less than ten minutes but you will have to reload everything that you loaded since you got it. It is a lot easier than formatting and does get rid of any junk picked up over a couple of years. On my Dell, the PC Restore was in a seperate partition on the hard drive and was activated by pressing a couple of keys at start up. It was fairly painless but reloading the programmes took a little time.

[M Toupin]

Actually it's malware/spyware. Viruses actually cause damage were spyware just causes headaches like browser pop ups or send data back to the originator. Bottom line though is you don't want either one on your PC.

There are several good free anti-spyware programs that should get rid of it for you. Since you've already tired Ad-aware, try SuperAntiSpyware or AVG. All three are freeware. Sometimes one product won't find it and the other will.

It's not destructive as in damaging your files, but I'll bet it's down right aggravating.

Mike

[Leo Graywacz]

I second Malwarebytes. It is a great program and it seems to be updated a couple of times a day. Just make sure you update it often and run it often. If you have something that it can't get rid of visit Daniweb.com and go to the virus and nasties forum. Ask there and the gurus will help you along to solve your problem. If you want to download the Malwarebytes program just add a .org to the end and that'll take you to their website. Good luck to you.

[David Freed]

Malwarebytes has worked for me on two occasions where AVG didn't stop a virus. It is a good program.

I have never tried using System Restore to get rid of a virus. It has worked the 2 or 3 times I installed a program that made my computer go nuts as if it had a virus. When you do a System Restore, you don't have to go back to the original factory settings. Just pick a restore point (date & time) before the problem started. My computer makes a restore point every day automatically. I never lost any programs except the one that was causing the problem.

[Scott Shepherd]

I had a family member with that on it not too long ago, along with numerous out things. One thing that one will do is when you click on something you think is okay, it takes you to somewhere that's not okay, or it's actually a link to run a virus and it looks like nothing is happening in your browser. It goes and gets more of them as well. It's a really nasty thing.

I couldn't get malwarebytes to get rid of it. I tried a number of things. I did adaware, spybot, malwarebytes and none of them finished getting it off. I think I finally found something called Advanced System Care and it finally cleaned it all up.

I will say that I ran that on my work PC as well and it blocked some critical connections that I couldn't seem to unblock, so I had to do a system restore to get my stuff working again. It locks down the system fairly darn tight and cleans up just about everything. I was impressed because it found things none of the others did, and it safely removed them as well.

You can go to download.com and search for advanced system care.

[Bob Lloyd]

I tried malawarebytes to get rid of it. It worked when I did a search through the AVG toolbar but not through the google toolbar. I could not restore the old settings through system restore which is why I went through the PC Restore route. The computer appears to work a lot better than before all this started so for me it was worth it. I am now making sure that I set restore dates for system restore , lesson learnt!!!!!!

[Mike Gager]

did you try deleting all cookies?

from what ive read its a bad cookie that causes it

[Dick Strauss]

Avast from Alwil is the best program I know of to both remove and prevent malware, viruses, worms, etc. It is free to use on personal computers once you register the product. It is usually ranked among the top two or three most effective at removing bad stuff from PCs.

http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html

No affiliation...just a happy user!

[Jim O'Dell]

I use Avast as my normal virus detection, and it does a wonderful job. I have had AdAware in the past. I liked it at first, but it seems to do less and less as time went on. Malwarebytes is pretty good too. Then I downloaded SuperAntiSpyware. If I start with the AdAware, it will find 5 to 8 spywares. Then run Malwarebytes, and it will find another 12 to 25 that AdAware missed. Then I can run SuperAntiSpyware, and I'll get anywhere from 50 to 130 more hits! This is running them one after the other with no searching between. I reversed the order one time, and the other two programs found fewer, but still found some that SAS didn't catch, so all are useful. Jim.

[Chuck Wintle]

Jim,
I recently fixed a computer with that problem. The problem may be in the hosts file. look there and you may find some extra IP addresses in it. Delete those extra addresses and your computer should be back to normal.
The hosts file can be found at C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc
Attached is what a normal hosts file should have in it.

You can use notepad to edit this file if necessary.

[Bruce Shiverdecker]

The easiest way I know to get rid of it is to reset your computer to a date prior to when you got the malware. Of course you lose anything you saved since then.

Bruce

[Russ Filtz]

Wife had one of those and it was vicious! Worked for days and it kept coming back, even with safe mode scanning. Finally had to rip out the drive and hook it up to another system as a non-boot drive. Scan it good then with all the proper tools. NOD32 antivirus, Superantispyware, malwarebytes, AdAware, Spywareblaster, HijackThis, etc. Finally got clean with that method.

Don't worry about transferring the malware to the scanning PC, doesn't happen. It's the method the pros use I found out. They don't even waste time trying to clean HD's on the original computer anymore. too many nasties have figured out how to disable the A/V stuff upon boot.

[John Lohmann]

I downloaded SmitfraudFix a few hours ago, I have a Dell Laptop & could not get restore to work. Mozilla seems to work normally now, all it did was delete my background & change my time setting. Hopefully there is no other problems.

[Mat Ashton]

I got hit with two attacks in two days. I went to a perfectly innocent site, one I had been to about a month ago with out trouble... AVG picked it up and said IE had been infected but had no solution or name for the attack... It then disabled AVG and changed all the security settngs in IE so I couldn't download AVG (or any fix for that matter) again and reinstall. I had to rebuild my wifes laptop as a result - she wasn't happy.

Second one hit my laptop. Similar situation AVG picked up the infection but had no solution or fix. The machine shortly after that rebooted itself. This time I was using Firefox... Had to rebuild that system as there was no fix that I could find and I had no idea what it had launched after the reboot and wasn't going to waite and find out hte hard way it was a key logger or something.

My solution... buy a mac. In the past I've had many people say "you should buy a mac they so nice to use... bla bla bla" I'd say "that's nice, now go away". But! I must say Microsoft has given me the much needed reasoning to conclude that macs are the way to go. So today I will be ordering a new macbook from apple and dumping the pcs.

[Tom Veatch]

... I must say Microsoft has given me the much needed reasoning to conclude that macs are the way to go. ...

I'm sorely afraid that if everyone takes that path, and Apple gains the market penetration that Microsoft now has, the Mac users will find themselves in the sights of the malware writers just as the Windows users now are. You're relatively safe until that happens.

I'm not familiar with the Mac OS, so I very well could be wrong, but I doubt the "malware immunity" of Mac users has much to do with the Mac OS being inherently more secure than the Windows OS. I stongly suspect the major reason is that there's a smaller user community and the malware writers don't get as much "bang for their buck" targeting Apple computers.

It's not Microsoft that's the problem, it's the lowlife pond scum that writes the stuff. There's where the blame lies. Blaming Microsoft is a little like blaming the auto maker when someone runs a red light and T-bones you as you cross the intersection.

[Edwood Ferrari]

I got hit by this on my Motion Tablet a couple of weeks ago just by visiting a suspect site. I am still in the process reinstalling the recovery disks. A big pain since it does not have a built-in CD Rom.

On my other computers I have started running an add-on to Fire Fox called "NO Script". By default it will not let any scripts run unless you OK them. I think this will help providing the sites you trust stay clean.

[Scott Shepherd]

Firefox also has a pretty good add-on called WOT (Web of Trust). It puts a little swirlly thingy next to all your google searches. Green is trusted, yellow, caution, red, problem site or site not rated. Helps make smarter click decisions from google searches.

[Mat Ashton]

On my other computers I have started running an add-on to Fire Fox called "NO Script". By default it will not let any scripts run unless you OK them. I think this will help providing the sites you trust stay clean.

Vista has that already but somehow in both cases the attacks got through without me clicling OK and then picked up by AVG.

For a while many, who claim to be very knowledgeable, were saying that this security feature in Vista made it nearly impossible to hack - not anymore...

[curtis rosche]

call geek squad. the ones from the commercial

[Mat Ashton]

I'm sorely afraid that if everyone takes that path, and Apple gains the market penetration that Microsoft now has, the Mac users will find themselves in the sights of the malware writers just as the Windows users now are. You're relatively safe until that happens.

I'm not familiar with the Mac OS, so I very well could be wrong, but I doubt the "malware immunity" of Mac users has much to do with the Mac OS being inherently more secure than the Windows OS. I stongly suspect the major reason is that there's a smaller user community and the malware writers don't get as much "bang for their buck" targeting Apple computers.

It's not Microsoft that's the problem, it's the lowlife pond scum that writes the stuff. There's where the blame lies. Blaming Microsoft is a little like blaming the auto maker when someone runs a red light and T-bones you as you cross the intersection.

I don't think apple has ever achieved more than 10% of the market share and I doubt with the prices they charge they ever will :D No point in trying to rape a mac users bank account - they spent all they had on buying the mac... but worth it to me.

The mac ability to avoid infection, at least I think this is part of the reason, is the unix base that it's written in.

I was just getting ready to sign up for a web based stock trading program when I got hit. A requirement to sign up was I have to give them all my banking details and such - more than enough information to allow someone in russia or china to clean out my account(s) if I had ignored AVG and or it didn't pick up the infection. More and more everyday companies are demanding that we send very sensitive information over the internet. So for me I'm going to do what I can to remove as much of that threat as possible.

Recently I jump on a few internet security think tanks and read up on what they see happening and where things are going. They say that hackers are rapidly changing focus - they're getting much more professional. No longer is it pimply faced script kiddies writing programs to wreak havoc on the masses. They're getting much more stealthy. They want to get stinking rich now not famous.

I wasn't blaming MS I was just saying they have provided the best argument as to why I need to take matters into my own hands. MS is powerless to stop the assault and it's going to get much harder to combat for them.

[Scott Shepherd]

I always love the people who say "Well, Apple will have virus' once they get popular". Might be true, but that might be 5 years from now, 10 years from now, or never. Would you rather spend the next 5 years not worrying about it at all, or spend the next 5 years fighting it day after day after day.

Might cost you $300 more, but for that $300 you don't have to deal with any of this stuff for the next 3-4 years (about the average lifespan of a computer).

If the do come out, then you can always switch back to PC's. But I'd give a lot more than $500 to not have to deal with any of this for the next few years. I'm running a small business, I don't have time or the resources to implement all this stuff or pay someone to do it for me.

[Frank Hagan]

I'm sorely afraid that if everyone takes that path, and Apple gains the market penetration that Microsoft now has, the Mac users will find themselves in the sights of the malware writers just as the Windows users now are. You're relatively safe until that happens.

I'm not familiar with the Mac OS, so I very well could be wrong, but I doubt the "malware immunity" of Mac users has much to do with the Mac OS being inherently more secure than the Windows OS. I stongly suspect the major reason is that there's a smaller user community and the malware writers don't get as much "bang for their buck" targeting Apple computers.

It's not Microsoft that's the problem, it's the lowlife pond scum that writes the stuff. There's where the blame lies. Blaming Microsoft is a little like blaming the auto maker when someone runs a red light and T-bones you as you cross the intersection.

Yep, the relative low market numbers are why Mac users don't get hit more often. There's an annual "Pwn 2 Own" contest that showed the most vulnerable systems. In order of the most vulnerable: MacBook Air (2 minutes to hack), Vista (2 days to hack) and the winner ... having none of the hackers defeat it ... a Sony Vaio running Linux. Article on it is at http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/29/linux-becomes-only-os-to-escape-pwn-2-own-unscathed/

I now recommend Macs to anyone who has never had a computer ... but mainly so they don't call me for support!

[phil harold]

I now recommend Macs to anyone who has never had a computer ... but mainly so they don't call me for support!

I need to implement that !

I also recommend malwarebytes.org/

[Scott Shepherd]

Interesting link Frank. Looks like hacking and not virus', and it looks like you have a computer that you can hook directly to as well. Might not be quite as easy for them if they were behind a router?

Still, hacking and viruses are two totally different things. No computer is immune from hacking.

When I was taking UNIX classes 20 years ago, the teacher actually worked at Bell Labs out in the midwest when they were developing it. We asked him then about hacks. He said anyone capable of hacking into UNIX was making so much money they wouldn't dream of it. 20 years ago all the UNIX people who were capable were already making 6 figures. They were professionals and had no desire to spend their time writing things that were bad for the system. They would rather spend their time improving it. I'm sure that's all changed now. We're about due for a new operating system that puts them all to shame. Linux, Windows, and UNIX have all been around a loooooong time now.

[Frank Hagan]

Interesting link Frank. Looks like hacking and not virus', and it looks like you have a computer that you can hook directly to as well. Might not be quite as easy for them if they were behind a router?

Still, hacking and viruses are two totally different things. No computer is immune from hacking.


They were ... see the PC World article at this link (http://www.pcworld.com/article/143962/vista_macbook_outonly_linux_left_in_hacking_contes t.html).

They were using browser exploits to install their software to simulate what trojans, worms and viruses do. The first part of the contest requires them to only use native OS vulnerabilities, and the Mac OS had one they could exploit. On day two, they could use common add-in programs and their vulnerabilities, so the Vista machine fell due to a Java security hole.

Its only a matter of time before Macs get targeted by malicious software; already two pirated programs downloaded by thousands of Mac devotees have carried viruses. But its still the safest and easiest platform for someone who doesn't want to tinker with the machine all the time.

[James Jaragosky]

I had a Trojan horse on one of my computers a month or two ago that I could not get rid of. It did the same thing you describe, hijacking web links. My anti virus software could not get rid of it, neither could Spybot or Microsoft Windows Live OneCare safety scanner, they could all see it, they just could not get rid of it, very frustrataing. I was about to reformat the hard drive and re-install Windows when I found Malwarebytes' AntiMalware scanner. Worked like a charm, plus the trial version is free.

http://www.malwarebytes.org/

Hope this helps.

Clay
Clay I did not have the same infection as you; but I got a really nasty Trojan. avg missed it. avg then found it after it got into my system and calmed that the Trojan was quarantined; but the Trojan was still reeking havoc with my system. I tried ad-ware spy-bot Norton and all missed or were unable to remove the problem. Malwarebytes worked the first time in less than 7 minutes.
Thanks so much for posting this product.
My 6 dollars comes through again.WOOT

[Craig D Peltier]

I second Malwarebytes. It is a great program and it seems to be updated a couple of times a day. Just make sure you update it often and run it often. If you have something that it can't get rid of visit Daniweb.com and go to the virus and nasties forum. Ask there and the gurus will help you along to solve your problem. If you want to download the Malwarebytes program just add a .org to the end and that'll take you to their website. Good luck to you.


Hi Leo, I went there an clicked on forums. The one ytou mentioned I dont see listed?

[Leo Graywacz]

http://malwarebytes.org

On the left side is a download free trial button, click on it. It brings you to another screen, choose download now. Then run the install program. Make sure you update the program. The first time you run it choose the full scan. After that you can use the shorter scan. If it ever finds anything run it again in the full scan mode.