In a momentary fit of insanity I allowed an offering of Explorer 8.0 (I think) to download.
The only visible consequence is an overnight firing up of Explorer such that I am greeted each morning with a Windows related advert. Curiously the screen is prevented from entering sleep mode.
Today's offering was for a Windows driver scanner for a Brother printer.
I am using XP with service pack 3. I know this system is about to be unsupported so am becoming very nervous about anything uninvited!
Do you have another computer that you can use to make a bootable CD to scan this machine for any known malware? Corrupting IE to make it show adverts or hijack keystrokes is unfortunately all too common.
You can't trust the main machine any more. There are some tools that use enough obfuscation that they might be able to detox an infected machine without being noticed by the malware. I have found MalwareBytes to work fairly well on other peoples infected PCs YMMV
Agreed that malwarebytes is the way to clear this, an excellent program, well thought of, very thorough and even asks polite permission to update itself before attempting to do so.
I prefer the direct download at:
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Cnet frequently (although not in this case) put up their own 'trick' download buttons to encourage you to install their own junkware.
It sounds like a fairly benign bit of adware, I'd download malwarebytes then unplug the machine form the internet then boot in safe mode and do their recommended scan.
Read the resulting report carefully and choose what you want rid of and what you want to keep, the adware should be obvious.
Running their beta antirootkit scan overnight (very thorough) after you have done this would be a good move too.
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I'd then run malwarebytes again after a day or so to make sure that a hidden trigger has re-installed the malware.
Firefox would be a better day to day browser but I would pick up v21.0 from mozilla or oldversion.com as it has more accessible privacy features than the latest version from Mozilla.
If it has a combo rw CD drive it shouldn't be. ISTR all the major AV players have some sort of daily disk image that you can download and run (and provide instructions for how to do it). You obviously have to tell the PC to boot from CD first instead of HD but many are already set like that by default. It shouldn't be too hard to do this. No harder than downloading the right file from your AV vendor and following a few simple instructions. It has the advantage that you are then using software that is familiar to you. Leaving it three days after the malware got past a decent AV product is usually enough time for their countermeasures to have caught up enough to zap it.
As Fred said download it from their main site Cnet will try and flog you stuff and add its own relatively benign adware if you are careless.
Increasingly lots of updaters have default settings to install annoying destablising plugins adware "tools" for browsers - Adobe for instance.
Well, dunno, I've been using 8 for years, and yet its not supported by Google and dropbox and others. Since you cannot get any newer version for XP my advice is that after April 1st, simply make Firefox your default browser which does work and carry on as before. No not seen any adverts. You may well have missed an option to have or not have adverts or another piece of software installed. I'm sure if you look around you can disable such things, or run Malwarebytes to see if you have any dodgy stuff on your machine. IE should not auto fire up. it should be a choice, so some html is being launched at start up and regularly, which sounds like maware to me. Look in msconfig.exe and see what is running at start up, if it is not recognised by you, disable it temp wise and reboot and make sure things work. I had this once with AVG, which was one of the reasons I shunted it off my system. There are avg safe search toolbars that can be set to do this as can other toolbars. Kick them into touch, particularly the Google heap. Brian
But note please I would not delete all host entries as that recommends and not download any tool. I don't have time now to find a better guide but as others have said Malwarebytes usually does the business.
Please note that this comes with no warranty whatsoever despite the fact that I am a former Microsoft developer and current drinking buddy of Angelina Jolie :)
They all do this come and try this one ads. I suggest if you use Firefox as the default browser that the first job is to install an ad blocker, it makes sites like file hippo etc much less of a hassle. There is one for IE but it only runs for a time and then wants to be payed for, but tis cheap and seems to work well. Brian
This is m2pub which is adware. Irritating but not malicious. To get rid of it, browse here to download then install and run the free version of Malwarebytes Antimalware software.
Actually, I don't think you have a serious issue. It just needs careful hunting down. Do just one thing at a time though, do not download every anti malware known to man and take the compter back to an earlier time all at once. That is not only the way to insanity, but to completely trashing the Windows operating system. It may well be amulti tsking system but it can only cope with one bit of abuse at a time!
At the risk of stating the obvious it the time to move on from an obsolete OS is long overdue. I had hung on to XP until a year ago when I bought a new laptop that came with Windows 7. It soon became apparent that the time to leave XP behind had come. Having installed Windows 7 on my desktop I am well pleased with it.
Well I had to line up some CISCO analogue telephone adapter units the other day via the web interface and some of the facilities on the config screen just weren't there..
Try as I might I couldn't get them to open so I could do a firmware upgrade Nothing on the CISCO support site anywhere .. so just gave up;(..
Came back to it a few days later and thought is there anything I overlooked and accidentally opened it this time in Chrome and mysteriously there're all there.
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