S
Steph
Okay folks, this sounds like the same thing as the post
directly beneath me from Dan.
To begin with, a couple of weeks ago my home page (which
has always been my ISP) was replaced with one called
www.find-now.com which looked like a list of all search
engines that I have ever heard about. Each one had its
own search box, so you could just scroll to your favorite
engine and type in your criteria and hit 'search'. I
never used it, but didn't change it either.
Then yesterday my real problems started. Whenever I type
anything that is not an URL in the address field on IE,
it automatically takes me to a search engine (MSN, I
think). Now I get a page asking if I am looking for
Google and telling me that my computer is "running
software that doesn't allow me to use Google". It goes
on to say that I am "seeing this page because my computer
is trying to send me to a website that is pretending to
be Google". The steps that it gives to fix it are to use
Notepad to open the following file: Local Disk(C)>
Windows > System32 > Drivers > etc > Hosts . And then it
wants me to remove any line containing the
text "google.com" It also recommends and gives links to
Spybot and Ad-aware.
Then I tried to access several different search engines
that I have on my favorites list and I get a much shorter
page that says "if I am seeing this page, I have
downloaded a malicious program that is keeping me from
visiting the page I intended" and it gives a link to
something like this: www.tweakxp.com/forum/....
I thought it might be spyware, so I installed and ran Ad-
aware. It found 27 items and quarantined them. This did
no good.
Next, I snooped around in this newsgroup and late last
night (early this morning) I found a post from about 7:33
pm yesterday made be "john" and answered by "Gary Tsang",
titled "search engines". John appeared to have a similar
problem and Gary indicated it was a Trojan.
Now my questions:
1) Is this spyware or Trojan?
2) If I were to apply the fix for the Trojan, shouldn't I
first make sure that is what the problem is? And how do
I determine that for sure? (I browsed several of the
links that Gary gave to John, and found fixes, but no way
to identify the virus for certain)
3) The pages that I am being redirected to...are they
malicious as well? Is it dangerous to click on the links
provided therein?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks, Steph
directly beneath me from Dan.
To begin with, a couple of weeks ago my home page (which
has always been my ISP) was replaced with one called
www.find-now.com which looked like a list of all search
engines that I have ever heard about. Each one had its
own search box, so you could just scroll to your favorite
engine and type in your criteria and hit 'search'. I
never used it, but didn't change it either.
Then yesterday my real problems started. Whenever I type
anything that is not an URL in the address field on IE,
it automatically takes me to a search engine (MSN, I
think). Now I get a page asking if I am looking for
Google and telling me that my computer is "running
software that doesn't allow me to use Google". It goes
on to say that I am "seeing this page because my computer
is trying to send me to a website that is pretending to
be Google". The steps that it gives to fix it are to use
Notepad to open the following file: Local Disk(C)>
Windows > System32 > Drivers > etc > Hosts . And then it
wants me to remove any line containing the
text "google.com" It also recommends and gives links to
Spybot and Ad-aware.
Then I tried to access several different search engines
that I have on my favorites list and I get a much shorter
page that says "if I am seeing this page, I have
downloaded a malicious program that is keeping me from
visiting the page I intended" and it gives a link to
something like this: www.tweakxp.com/forum/....
I thought it might be spyware, so I installed and ran Ad-
aware. It found 27 items and quarantined them. This did
no good.
Next, I snooped around in this newsgroup and late last
night (early this morning) I found a post from about 7:33
pm yesterday made be "john" and answered by "Gary Tsang",
titled "search engines". John appeared to have a similar
problem and Gary indicated it was a Trojan.
Now my questions:
1) Is this spyware or Trojan?
2) If I were to apply the fix for the Trojan, shouldn't I
first make sure that is what the problem is? And how do
I determine that for sure? (I browsed several of the
links that Gary gave to John, and found fixes, but no way
to identify the virus for certain)
3) The pages that I am being redirected to...are they
malicious as well? Is it dangerous to click on the links
provided therein?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks, Steph