Thread: IE Search links get Redirected

Caught an annoying virus the other day. No matter what search engines I used in IE, all the links I clicked on, after doing a search, resulted in a redirect to some mysearchcorp URL and then redirected again to some lame ass shewired website. Installing Safari 5 gave me a temporary solution to search for some help but had no luck. Found many useless suggestions to install this and that.

Anyway, determined to fix it myself, I did some digging into my startup via msconfig and noticed a strange line executing a windows system file in a strange location. Behold, it appears some how a site I've visited must have installed an executable in a hidden folder located under "c:\users\glen\appdata\roaming\systemproc\lsass.ex e". I ended any processes resembling that file, whether it was legit or not and was able to delete the culprit. Unchecked the line from startup, reboot and voila, IE searches are back to normal. Hopefully my find helps anyone with a similar issue.

Enjoy!

Well it appears the battle wasn't over. I was intermittantly getting pop ups from IE taking me to these spam sites and sometimes IE would crash or not start. My antivirus software log shows the following entries whenever I surf the web:

20101119 210118 Blocked web request to "194.8.251.138" for user glen-PC\glen. 'Mal/HTMLGen-A' has been found at this website, reference ID 194.8.251.138.

Searching via any search engine appears to kick start the virus. I left it for a while since it wasn't really affecting my experience but eventually it started to affect my searches. So finally I had enough of the annoyance and decided to roll up my sleeves and get to work. This was a tough one to fix but after some time, it was determined to be a root kit virus. Anyway, you can download this removal software from Kaspersky Lab available here: http://support.kaspersky.com/viruses...?qid=208280684

Enjoy!