re. Google redirect malware

[Bulletguy07]

I know there has been much on about the Google redirect recently though I see that threads been closed down.....no idea why.

I had this annoying malware over the weekend in IE7 which stopped it running but managed to access the internet using Chrome. Used a number of sites to gain more info, most of which were recommending the usual variety of "removal tools". Often these turned out to be nothing more than Registry Cleaners which simply make matters worse. Many forum posters, no doubt well intentioned, came up with a plethora of gobble-de-gook 'fix its', but only one post made any sense to me.............reformat. And thats what I did.

At least thats 100% guaranteed. A totally clean sweep and begin from fresh.

Exactly who these idiots are sending out this crap spiking peoples computers, god only knows, and precisely what they are trying to achieve is simply beyond me.

[StarMike]

For those of us with hundreds of GB of data on our computers, reformatting is not a reasonable solution. Even if you can afford to reformat once, this doesn't prevent you from being infected in the future, and since you aren't able to find the initial cause of the malware, you won't be able to defend against it the next time.

The other problem with this malware is that you can try 3 or 4 different virus scanners, and they won't find anything, yet if you tried one more, it would have found the problem. For instance, I tried a number of scanners and they couldn't find anything. I also tried a scanner that scans for hidden system tasks, and it found a "suspicious" task, which it deleted, and disabled the file. After that, I no longer had problems with google redirecting. I sent the file to VirusTotal for analysis and it came back here: http://www.virustotal.com/file-scan/report...24d-1283458162#

Looking at this report, you can see that AVG, Kapersky, Microsoft (Defender/Security Essentials), McAfee, Sophos, Sunbelt, Trend Micro, and many others that find nothing wrong with the file, yet if I had tried Avast or Panda, they would have found it.

[Bulletguy07]

For those of us with hundreds of GB of data on our computers, reformatting is not a reasonable solution.

It is for that very reason alone I 'downsized' my C drive to a smaller drive (80gb) which I use for basic prog installations, browser/s, email, media players etc. Probably the max I use is little more than 20 or 30gb of disk space. Anything I want to keep permanent, I shift immediately to one of two other drives (160gb and 640gb).

Even if you can afford to reformat once, this doesn't prevent you from being infected in the future, and since you aren't able to find the initial cause of the malware, you won't be able to defend against it the next time.

The other problem with this malware is that you can try 3 or 4 different virus scanners, and they won't find anything, yet if you tried one more, it would have found the problem.

Agree entirely. In fact the only sure way of never getting hit is not connecting to the internet!

However many people find reformatting a daunting experience....especially when they don't know how to do it. And many don't as a friend probably did it for them x number of years ago. I learnt this way but soon realised I would have to do it myself one day so made damned sure I knew the procedure. I'm running with XP Pro and it took little more than a couple of hours to reformat the drive back up to desktop. The time consuming part really is getting all the updates and service packs re-installed.

These 'magic' cleaners, debuggers, and 'fix its' etc etc are all well and good but if you've been hit by some malware crap or a virus, identifying is one thing......successfully removing it is quite another!

I had both AVG and Malwarebytes installed. They "found" infections and "removed" them......which turned out to be rubbish as I eventually ended up with the dreaded blue screen so left with no other option but to reformat.