Search Engine Hijack Fix

Happy New Year.

OK so I am a little late.

We have been fighting off colds inbetween all the shovelling of snow and breaking up ice and the frigid cold temps.

Then our computer got a virus too -- a search engine hijack. No fun. We could not do anything really without getting spam site links coming up although we could see the proper info. I first noticed this on my blog here when I did a search for one of my posts. So when you moused over the link or clicked on the link, you would be taken to the spam site, not the site you were looking for. Don't click on the links!

This went on for pages and pages at Google, MSN, Yahoo searches and for days.We were also getting pop ups for cleaning our system saying we have so many virus issues and trojans. They look like they are part of your system but the blinking icons give them away along with a URL -- so watch out.

We could use Ask.com and Metacrawler or Dogpile searches with regular results, no spam links there. The computer also ran slow and we have high speed FiOs.

So after so much Norton scanning (which they did NOT find it) for days; a call to Norton, which they requested us pay $100 to clean up our puter, AdAware, SpyBlaster and SpyBot, a registry clean, and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware scans, and several studies of our HiJack This log (all free downloads), the virus still NOT gone, my daughter suggested AVAST, a FREE download for anti-virus scanning and low and behold, THEY found the culprit and quarentined it. She uses Avast regularly (the free version, there is a paid one also) on her laptop and has had great consistant results -- it updates daily.
We are all set for now.

It was suggested by others we talked to, to not only run one but a couple of anti-virus softwares because not every one scan product finds every thing.Naturally, we also told Norton that they need to put this fix on their list to eliminate other people from the headaches of a search engine hijack.

My daughter also told us that using FireFox would be a better choice to use on the internet since those sorts of things don't happen as much. Yes, the exact same advice given to me in my computer courses that I eventually earned a degree in. Not a good student I guess since I have not practiced the advice learned.

So maybe someone will learn something from this little frustrating cyber-ad venture.
Hope it helps someone.

Avast -- free virus cleaning download
Search Engine Hijacking Article -- explains the issue well but no helpful tips.
Hijacked Proxy Server URLs Remedy -- an advanced discussion on how you can prevent this by adding codes to your site.