(no subject)

[deckardcanine]

My Google problem at work has yet to be solved. Neither Malwarebytes nor Symantec can detect what's causing about half my clicks from Google result pages to be redirected to unrelated commercial sites, always with a squiggle icon next to the URL. The IT person who tried them said she'd research the issue; she has yet to get back to me. At a forumite's suggestion, I downloaded Microsoft Security Essentials -- but now I can't find the .exe file. Another forumite suggested I look for a suspiciously new file in the System 32 folder, but there are so darn many to search. The only other suggestion I got looks like it'll cost money.

As it happens, last Friday the Free Rice site started offering a toolbar to let you donate 2,500 grains of rice for every five searches. Between this feature and the Google problem, I gladly downloaded it and have had no such redirections since.

Unfortunately, the toolbar is buggy. After counting down from five searches to go (it doesn't register all of mine), it resets to five; after another five, it says "No Rewards Until Tomorrow." Once it said that before I'd even clicked that day, which makes me wonder what time the server is set to. At the right, it's supposed to count all the grains donated today, presumably not just by my actions as the numbers get into the hundreds of thousands -- except that it keeps resetting unpredictably to 0.

The other problem is that the engine is powered by Yahoo!. I'm getting reminders that it wasn't just peer pressure that made me switch to Google in college. At least it's not prone to obnoxious banner ads at the topic like I remember Yahoo! being.

And now there's yet another problem on my work computer: random pop-ups at random intervals. I wonder if the reputed insecurity of Yahoo! is to blame for that, even when I'm not using it at the moment. I hesitate to tell my IT folks, lest they be annoyed at me for having three difficult issues in less than two weeks and suspect that I've been misusing the computer.

Comments

[carlfoxmarten]

My first suspect is malicious ad sites, especially the ones embedded by JavaScript.
(even more especially the ones that could have been hijacked)

This is actually a problem I had for quite a while when I first started using Google Chrome as my main browser until whatever it was had been shut down.
(or I blocked all the websites in my hosts file, hosts.txt on Windows, /etc/hosts on Linux, etc)

If you ever have that problem again, try to download the page with another tool (I don't know if there's a wget for Windows) and use a plain text editor to see what scripts are being included, blocking all that aren't from Google.

[stevenroy.livejournal.com]

Do you need me to come over there?

Well, maybe we should try the next best thing first:

Try downloading [this free tool], which basically lists everything set to start up automatically when you start Windows or your web browser. It can save that list to a log file, which you can email to me (michrev at gmail, or this) for analysis and further instructions if necessary.

Also, [here] is a free online virus scan program that I use. I've found that it detects a lot of stuff that Symantec/Norton doesn't. It might be worth a try. (Note that sometimes you have to click IE's "information bar" more than once to install it completely; look for it if you get an error message before the scan starts. Also, the free version won't disinfect most stuff, but it does locate it. You can save a log file from the scan, and email it to me as well if it finds anything you'd need help to get rid of.)

[deckardcanine.livejournal.com]

Someone else suggested HijackThis yesterday. I'll give it a try.