Yep this also happened to me. While at work. AT WORK !!! sorry had to say it like it is supposed to be said, yelling.
Now at my job, I am not “The Tech Guy”. I am the drawings and images guy. I mean I know plenty, but they already have a “resident nerd” and well, he is pretty good at it. So by my wandering around on the internet doing things “my way” and stumbling into an ” Oh dang!” moment isn’t the best thing for my career. First warning was ” Microsoft is ready to install Explorer 8″ Yep you guessed it, I installed it . Not thinking one time that I was on Firefox the whole time.
Ok I started with the on board Symantec end point. It caught either 8 viruses , or the same virus kept trying to rescue it’s self. lol I have no idea, I was panicking and hurrying , I saw the word ” Trojan” in the pop up warning from Symantec, and freaked out. I decide I better go check Windows update site and see if I ever downloaded Internet Explorer 8, The page would not load, I run to another computer on the network and all is fine, I head back to mine, still nothing. So I headed to the first place I could think of. Bitdefender’s online malware scan. It never lets me down. Well this time it surely did. I take it up a notch and head to “Malware Bytes” and start doing a search in Google and search the term “windows update takes me to Google” and started reading all the people praying and begging for help. The ever so faithful “tech guy forums” turned up an unanswered request for help, wow that was surprising. After about 45 minutes of reading, I find nothing (well I actually found the right thing but over looked it like 10 times) and malware bytes is done scanning, It found nothing, nothing at all, I try and update it, will not let me, along with anything else I tried to scan with.
So now I break out A-squared, not the worst thing in the line up for sure, but it did not find anything either. Ok now I am feeling like I am losing my mind. Well as this is going on I am still reading threads in forums about the issue. I go back to this thread . The first link in the first and only response, well tried that. Second link I click it it takes me to Super AntiSpyware. First thought is ” Well crap, this place looks like it’s just going to make the issue worse. I figured that it really couldn’t get much worse if I scan the file first. So I wander off to the download area for the free version. All was fine until I get to the point that I actually try and download it. Another dead link.. “hmmm, the link is dead, it is blocked, it must be what I need” is exactly what I thought. Ok also another thing about that name, just kept making me think about power rangers. It really sounded like the slogan from some kid’s show “super anti-spyware free trial go team action go!!!” is what I kept saying and giggling.
I walked over to another one of the computers in the office and download the file and slip it onto an open space on the server.
Walk back to my computer and here comes the I.T. guy, just in time. I let him fumble through it like I did. He made a lot of the assumptions I did at first, I walked away to the store next to the office and get a soda while he does exactly what I did. I get back into the office and there he is, lol just like me.. Reading the forum posts for a second time. We agreed that super action malware scanner was the way to go. Well we install it while Spybot S&D or something was finishing it’s scan.
We reboot to safe mode administration by pressing F8 after the bios scan, just before the windows logo. Yes I was just sitting there hitting the F8 button repeatedly till I got the boot menu.
In administration mode we ran the quick scan. Within seconds it finds 3 Trojans and a dns changer, by the end of the scan Super AntiSpyware found two root-kits and two registry key modifications.
We rebooted after the scan and checked to see if Microsoft Windows Update worked, all was fine but still could not update any of the virus scanners. So we reboot to safe mode administrator, and do the full scan. Nothing came up.
So far not all of the issues are resolved, I will go through my “hosts” file and see if there are any changes there. Probably not but hopefully there are. I know how to change that. and I will add the link that I got the file from in the first place to the list of blocked sites. I may even email a heads up to the guys from mvp’s hosts file website (google it).
This is the help I have for you. I hope it works for you. Heck I’m going to run that goofy named program on my home pc now and see what it finds. http://www.superantispyware.com/
Hope it helps you get un-hijacked. I promise that program actually works, just the name is stupid and their web designer is cheesy.
Also that “Google” page I kept getting redirected to was not regular google. it was an affiliate page. Google English. So the freak was making money off of each search we did while we tried to resolve the issue. Google needs to ban that account.