possible malware/ adware?

In My Humble Opinion
1

hi dopers,
delurking to hopefully avail myself of your wisdom because this thing is driving me crazy…
Certain words appear to be hyperlinked and when I mouse over them a pop up appears advertizing something or telling me that I won a prize (mainly iphone/ apple or diet related). I already emailed TubaDiva (hi TubaDiva & thanks for the advice!) so I know it’s not an SDMB problem. Running AVG and Malwarebytes didn’t help. Now I didn’t think to read the content of the pop ups carefully till half an hour or so ago, but the couple I came across since appear to be from a site named prize give away club dot com (obviously, no blanks between words). Googling the words doesn’t turn up anything useful besides one single unanswered as of yet forum question from somebody located (suprisingly) in my own small country.
So - anybody heard of this cursed adware entity? Any advice would be muchly appreciated.

ETA - I probably should have put this in GQ

2

Got any toolbars, browser speed ups, or the like installed? Get rid of them.

3

The word “toolbars” in your post was a mouseover for free samples from something called “Bsaving”. Should this happen if I’m signed on a member?

edited to add: and the phrase "“free sample” in this post was another mouseover!

4

If you see this sort of thing on the board, you have picked up a bug.

It’s not anything being generated by or initiated from The Straight Dope or from Sun-Times media.

I really like AVG – there’s a free version – http://www.avg.com

I’m sorry you’re having this mess happening. Ain’t none of us.

5

It looks like you are right-my previous post was from the food bank, but it’s not happening here at home. I’ll clean their system when I do my shift tomorrow.

6

he he… on first viewing, the word “free” in Czarcasm’s post gave a mouseover, and when I reloaded the page, I get a mouseover on the word “browser” - the quote, not the original word by **Quartz ** .
Now, I paid more attention to those damn mouseover pop ups and found they were linked to something called coupon drop down, which upon further Googling, is apparently connected to an add-on called Yontoo (I don’t know how that got installed). Following instructions on the Malwarebytes forum I installed and ran a programm called Super Anti Spyware which - to my dismay - found and removed around 150 threats, including the Yontoo add-on. (I also manually removed the add-on from Firefox). I then restarted my laptop.
I triumphantly returned to this thread, read the replies by **Quartz **and Czarcasm, and … as I just mentioned I am still getting the pop ups.
:frowning:
Off to investigate the suggestions by Quartz.
Thanks guys!

7

How do I go about finding browser speed ups?

8

Since this isn’t about the SDMB, I’ll move this from ATMB to IMHO, home of advice and diagnostics.

9

Thankee kindly.
I’m running out of ideas, so any advice would be appreciated!

10

Sounds like running Malwarebytes is in order.

11

Oh, yes - I ran it several times to no avail.
Anyway, I did a Firefox reset (and promptly reinstalled Adblock) and it seems to have gone away.
I am now furiously scooting around threads and mousing over all the links I find to see if they are real links or … that thing.
So far, so good. :slight_smile:

12

This page should be what you are looking for.

13

I can’t speak to Malwarebytes’ general effectiveness but there are definitely false negatives with that one; we had a rootkit on our home computer about 18 months ago and it picked up nothing.

If the OP (and ChefGuy) can’t make the things go away any other way, it may be worth a visit to one of several tech support boards where volunteers will help you debug your computer.

14

Items of this variety are usually browser modifications.

Programs like Hijackthis will spit out a log of all the details but it will take someone who knows how to read them to know what to do with them.

The forums at bleepingcomputer and computerhope are both excellent for this sort of thing.

15

Just bumping this to thank everybody for their advice.
As mentioned earlier, I fixed this by removing Yontoo from my Firefox add-ins (also had to go to Add/remove programs in the Control Panel and do an uninstall). In the process I discovered a Malwarebytes type program called SuperAntiSpyware which actually seems to be more efficient than Malwarebytes to remove all residual
threats. What finally fixed it was doing a Firefox reset. Have had no trouble since and I can now go back to being a lurker (though I am tempted to start responding to some threads… who knows?!?)
Thanks you guys!