I was trying to find a standard definition of the word “sociopath” for Rand Rover’s benefit, but when I tried Googling, I got redirected to some site called “Gala” that seemed to consist of useless pop-ads, and spam and garbage. Anyone have a clue what’s up with this?
Can’t believe there hasn’t been a thread about this, as the SD seems dependent on Google, but if there has been I haven’t seen it yet.
Weird. It’s working fine for me.
You’ve most certainly picked up a virus.
Makes sense to me. I had a bunch of viruses the other day, and had the IT people do a major Malware scan, after which they assured me that my laptop was clean. Bozos.
Sounds like it’s time to format the hard drive…
Google started their shut down early this evening due to lack of interest and a failed business model. Few saw it coming. They are phasing it out in waves over the next couple of days so you were probably one of the early ones to get hit. Everyone else, search while you can because it is going to go poof really soon. It is sad really. I liked google although it seems most others didn’t see it the same way.
There are other search engines though like Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves that provide similar services. I just hope they don’t all fall like a line of dominoes. Plenty of people have told me this internet thing is just a fad and it looks like they are starting to be right. Just to be safe, I am saving my Facebook photo albums to floppy disks now.
I’ve beaten that type of malware before. I used an antivirus boot CD, HijackThis, Malwarebytes, the Recovery console to delete a few files, and then finally Combofix.
Also, it it’s like it was at one place, the problem was actually on another computer. Note to security people: Deep Freeze is not sufficient security.
D’oh. Time to clear out my series of tubes.
You most likely just have to clear out your Host file. It’s located in
*%SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc*
where %SystemRoot% most likely is C:\windows, and should contain only the following (and nothing else):
#This is an example of the hosts file
127.0.0.1 localhost loopback
::1 localhost
Your malware probably overwrote it, which is what is sending you to the crap site instead of Google.
Sounds like the Google Redirect Virus. Haven’t dealt with it myself, but the first link below looks the most helpful to me.
http://www.review-buddy.com/spyware-removers/how-to-remove-google-redirect-virus.html
The poster said “the IT people.” Does this mean the poster is part of a network, like at work?
Not sure what “part of a network” means. Yes, my laptop is owned by the large university I work for–but its use is mostly (if not all) mine, mainly from home. I’m sure I got the viruses by downloading images from some untrustworthy web sites, though I’m not sure what being on a network would do to make that better or worse. Explain? (And I’m an English prof, not a Computer Sciences prof, so please explain in non-technical language, if you’d like me to understand what being on a network means.)