My desktop with windows server 2008 was browser hijacked since yesterday, and I was pulling my hair out. 
I searched on Firefox, but you know what? FF was acting unnaturally – redirecting me to some quite different urls when clicking on search links. Chrome was not working at all – did not load pages, and gave me the irritating message about killing pages or waiting. I was about ready to kill Chrome by then.
But Lo and Behold! I got saved by lots of people out there. Though I could not directly click the search links, I just right clicked, copied the link, and pasted them in the new tab. This worked. The 2 urls for fixing Firefox were: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/forum/1/551666, specifically the part
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
Windows Defender – http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/defender/default.mspxIf 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
The other url that helped me was http://en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-24363-search-result-redirecting-to-another-site, specifically about Hitman Pro.
So I downloaded hitman pro, malwarebytes anti-malware, and trojan remover. I already had superantispyware. I ran each of these, and rebooted, and I got all my other browsers working correctly – I have Opera, Safari and IE too. But the problem with Firefox and Chrome remained.
By this time, I was already on my second day of getting stupid urls while searching, and was getting very very annoyed. But I took heart that at least 3 of my 5 browsers were working correctly, even if they were not my favs.
Then I realised that folder options in the windows explorer was not working. So I searched for that help, and I got http://www.technologyquestions.com/technology/windows-xp/164608-folder-options-file-types-options-all-greyed-out.html, which told me to do some regedit. I found that regedit was also not working. By now, I was completely convinced that I would have to reinstall a to z on the desktop, and I was preparing for a long haul at the computer. Fortunately, I found out that I had a rootkit on my system, but it was not getting deleted by either malaware or trojan remover. Since I was also searching for chrome not loading pages, I got that search url help too from here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=3618f9c1ca7ed6dc&hl=en, which led me to download kaspersky utility from
http://support.kaspersky.com/viruses/solutions?qid=208280684, which was tdsskiller, and it did the job. So I now have Chrome working beautifully, my FF takes me to actual search links, my regedit works and my folder options are back on.
HHHHHHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!
Technorati Tags: browser hijacked, search urls, folder options
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