OT what have I done?

[Ian Jackson]

In message , tony sayer writes

Yes - beware of where you download Firefox from.

As my existing Firefox was not quite behaving as normal, I decided to do a fresh install. The first site that Google brings up is:

BIG MISTAKE! I was a bit suspicious when I was offered various additional 'extras' - which I rejected. But despite rejecting the kind offers, I was left with ZoneAlarm searchbar on all of my browsers, and ZoneAlarm as the home page. I'm still busy getting rid of it. Why Goog£e to££erate these bogu$ website$ is $ure£y my$tery (or i$ it?).

[Tim Lamb]

Right. The full scan list on photo bucket. Looks totally confusing to me!

[John Rumm]

Like I said, have it nuke the lot of them ;-)

[fred]

If any additional confirmation were required, totally agree, junk, junk & more junk, bin em :-)

[Tim Lamb]

In message , fred writes

Hooray! No morning firing up of Explorer and no advert!

Well done chaps:-)

The only changes noticed so far is that I've lost Google (UK): in explorer where you could restrict searches to your local country. The icon is still there on the toolbar but just opens up a general search. Who wants pricing in dollars?

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[John Williamson]

:-? Americans. If you don't, you can set the search engine to google.co.uk or anything else you wish either by using the right click menu on the search engine button or going into the setup program.

[Tim Lamb]

Actually it has returned without intervention from me!

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[Tim Lamb]

Should I strip out Malwarebytes or will it depart naturally when I fail to sign up for the paid version?

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[fred]

In article , Tim Lamb writes

No harm in leaving it, it will only run if you invoke it and as you've picked up junk in the past it would be worth running periodically to check for unseen naughties.

Also, you'll be re-running it in a few days to check for re-infection, right :-?

It's slightly worrying that your browser google search prefs returned on their own, that implies something has run in order to change them which looks suspicious to me. Anything dodgy will get picked up on your re-run later (with updated defs) and it may have been a prefs click you made.

While your infection appears to have been pretty benign adware, it wouldn't do any harm to download and run Malwarbytes beta anti rootkit scan (details in my first post) overnight to make a clean sweep.

[Tim Lamb]

In message , fred writes

Yes. Anything naughty seems to happen overnight. I did nothing to re-instate.

OK again. I have used an MS anti rootkit scan in the past. Nothing found on this machine with active Norton but my wife's laptop running Vista and no paid protection turned up something.

[John Rumm]

It will sit there doing nothing til you run it next time. The non paid for version is not "active" or resident as such - its just a single shot scanner.

[John Rumm]

Just visiting the google.co.uk site can set a cookie indicating that is your preference - then visits to the the .com automatically redirect.