I’ve been surfing Google like usual today, but this time it’s a little different. Almost every link I click, becomes “redirected” so that when I click “Louis Wain’s Annual” the site that comes up is “yellow pages-search dot com”. Occasionally a click will send me to the place I expected, but most of the time, some other “dummy” or “spacer” site comes up (such as “artists-search dot com”). I can access the real page I want if I copy and paste the URL into a new tab.
This is a phenomenon I haven’t experienced before, and I was just wondering if anyone else out there has had this happen and if anyone can explain what it is. I assume it’s some sort of malware and plan to run spyware scanners - any other thoughts as to what might be causing this or how to fix it? It’s very irritating.
Sounds like your browser got hijacked. Run those anti-malware programs immediately.
If you sometimes do get taken to the correct sight, my first guess would be that some of the sites you’re trying to get to via google have out of date IP addresses. The owner of the website you want may have changed web hosts or the web host changed its IP address or something. Google cached the old IP address and doesn’t bother checking for the latest one.
Meanwhile, when you paste in the domain name/URL yourself, your computer queries its nearest DNS server for the latest IP address associated with that domain name. If it doesn’t have it, it queries the next one, ect. until it finds it and answers your computer and off you go. IP address info propagates around the internet constantly, and it usually only takes a moment to get the latest.
You have malware on your computer. Likely, your internet browser is now configured to use a web proxy. The malware uses this proxy to redirect all of your traffic through their server. Most of the time, they will intercept search queries; occasionally they will let some through. This is a pretty common problem and is often straight-forward to fix, but sometimes it can be tricky.
A quick way to check this is to look at your browser settings and see if it is configured to use a web proxy.
There are a lot of malwares that do this, so it may be necessary to figure out which malware you have. You can Google “google redirects malware” or something similar to see a lot of pages where people walk you through identifying and removing this malware. If you can find a good step-by-step, I highly recommend it; even if you are experienced.
There is free software to clean this up. Start with Hijack This. Also use Lava Soft’s Ad-Aware and Spy-Bot S&D. Use the links that I included. If you Google for these programs instead, pay attention to the company name and program title. There are usually Google sponsored hits for other products, but using these terms.
I seem to remember having to run these programs over and over with many reboots before it got fully removed, but it got removed in the end.
Post again or PM if you have questions or problems.
Don’t forget Malwarebytes Anti-malware, I found that to be great too, in addition to the ones the above poster mentioned.
Just out of curiosity what browser are you using? If you have more than one browser do they both do this?