In the past 24 hours I’ve noticed some strange and annoying behavior when doing Google searches with Internet Explorer. Clicking on one of the suggested links leads to an advertising page with some very loose relationship to the actual link (e.g. a link about bald eagles led to a page on baldness cures). Clicking on BACK leads to the suggested link.
I’ve done a virus scan and a Malwarebytes scan, each of which turned up nothing. I see none of this behavior when doing the same search using Google Chrome.
I have the exact same problem on my other laptop computer. We are pretty sure it’s some sort of virus, but we haven’t been able to find anything at all with every scan we’ve tried (AVG, ClamWin, windows defender, malwarebytes, ad-aware, search and destroy, kaspersky… I have no idea what else my husband has tried, but it’s been a couple of weeks now!)
If you find a fix, please let me know! It’s driving me crazy!
Malwarebytes should fix this IF you can manage to download it*. Make sure you get all the updates too. mnemosyne, did your husband update all of that software before running a scan?
*I say IF you can download it because many versions of this virus also block your ability to get to a lot of specific sites (such as malwarebytes.org) and non-browser download locations (such as the in-program AVG updater).
If you’re to the point where you can’t download and/or update your scanning programs, shoot me a PM and I will put it up in a place where you are able to download it (my personal server, which is not blocked by the virus).
Malwarebytes still updates, but AVG doesn’t. Via bleepingcomputers, it seems a lot of people have had something similar that malwarebytes can clean, but this is different. It really has been nearly a month since we started scanning at least daily, and the problem persists. My husband has a thread going on over there, but so far, none of the possible solutions have yielded any results.