Some techy help needed from my f-list

[selenay]

I am discovering the down side to being known as a geek by my family here. Tech support!

My aunt's computer has decided to play silly buggers. Just before I arrived, her home page in FireFox got switched to Yahoo - she swears she did nothing. I switched it back to Google without a problem and the computer ran perfectly.

About a week ago, she started having problems. It's hard to make out quite what all of the problems are, but it sounds like the computer isn't letting her browse the Internet properly although she can't really articulate what it's doing. She originally couldn't get into MSN either, but that seems to have worked itself out now. The bit that really scared her was that around the same time she had a flood of popups and blue screens warning her that her computer had been invaded by viruses, trojans, worms etc.

Hmmm.

She decided to just shut it down and look into getting someone to clean it up at some stage, but we've all been so busy with shipping arrivals and some work being done on her house that nobody got around to it.

Last night a friend walked her through running a full AVG scan but nothing virus-like was detected. I'm starting to think that those pop-ups weren't from her virus scanner but were webpages popping up with malicious intent. I'll need to check with her one whether she clicked the 'OK' button on any of them because she wasn't too clear on what they were.

Also last night, pop ups kept appearing whenever they were doing anything on her computer. A lot of them were ads but one or two were distinctly unsavoury. All of them were launched from Mozilla, which is her default browser. My aunt's comment was "Mozilla keeps interfering whenever we do anything!"

Her friend attempted to uninstall Mozilla but the computer wouldn't let her, saying that Mozilla was still running even though they'd closed it. So they turned to the computer programmer of the family to solve the problem :-)

I'm leaning towards the possibility that she's got a big spyware/adware problem on her computer. Does this sound familiar to anyone? And does anyone know of some tools that I could download to scan her computer and confirm/disprove my theory? I've never had a problem like this on my own computer so I'm a little uncertain on how to fix these problems!

All help will be gratefully received and virtual chocolate thrown your way.

Comments

[wimble.livejournal.com]

I've not had anything similar either.

However, taking the information at face value: reboot the computer, and uninstall Mozilla before doing anything else. If that doesn't work, then spank it soundly, reboot to safe mode (press F8 while it's booting, before the Windows splash screen comes up), and then uninstall it.

Firefox is much better, especially with AdBlock and NoScript installed (although NoScript does stop sites working, until you re-enable them, so it may be too much of a good thing).

You're probably as capable as I am of looking up spyware/adware/virus removers on wikipedia.

[selenay]

The reboot and uninstall has been tried several times but it sounds like something is either interfering or launching Mozilla in the background whenever the computer restarts. I'll try rebooting in safe mode and see whether it can be uninstalled.

I think that I've found a malware remover that will be as good as anything else out there - all the reviews are good and it appears to combine adware and spyware removal. It's even recommended as a fix for one of the nasties that I think might be a candidate for what's causing all this. So I'll be giving that one a go and see what it pulls up. After three hours of Googling around, I'm starting to get some ideas for what's happening (and some hints of forums that I can go to if I can't get this stuff uninstalled using a malware remover!).

My aunt has been good about not installing anything daft, but I'm starting to suspect that she must have visited a website that installed something. Apparently she was doing some research on something the doctor prescribed her and went to a 'health' website that I'm feeling a little dubious about *sigh*

[evil_plotbunny]

It sounds very much like a virus/spyware/adware. Make sure you have the latest version of the virus checking software and if possible, run it from a write protected disk. There's always a chance that the virus scanner has been compromised or is out of date.

[selenay]

I need to have a check and see what the status of her AVG is. She's got it installed and it does a quick scan every day (apparently) but the really in depth scan didn't pull up anything. I'm starting to get some leads on what kind of thing it could be and I've got a malware remover that sounds like it should do the job.

Or I hope it will.

And if all else fails, I've found a couple of forums that give more advanced help on removing the really tricky buggers so that's somewhere to go if I can't get it removed using this program.

I feel much more educated about all of this than I did a few hours ago!

[evil_plotbunny]

I don't use Windows, so I'd be doing the same thing you are. I'm just guessing from experience with other people's computers. Good luck.

[selenay]

Thanks for the support. I've always been so careful with my machine that I have no idea what to do with machines that get nasties on them. Just how to prevent the nasties appearing in the first place *sigh*

[evil_plotbunny]

*hugs* Hope things get sorted out.

[nicci-mac.livejournal.com]

Have you tried system restore? You'd have to go back to a point just before all the problems occured but it's saved my life a couple of times

[selenay]

Hmm, now that's another thought. If all else fails, it's definitely something to consider. I'll have to find out whether she did anything (like download photos etc) recently that she wouldn't want to lose, but it might be a last resort if nothing else works. Thanks for the idea!

[tejas.livejournal.com]

Get spybot and run it. Then shut down popups in Firefox. Get adblocker for Firefox, too. Clear out all cookies and temporary internet files. Also, go to the command line and run chkdsk.

[feather-autant.livejournal.com]

I second this!

Spybot is here. It's free, so that's nice. :)

[tejas.livejournal.com]

And let it kill anything it wants. Just be sure to update it before you run it. No matter how well the site tries to keep the download uptodate, as soon as you save something like that, the data files are obsolete.

[selenay]

Update everything updatable, check. Thank you :-) I think that all the cookies and temp files were deleted last night when the friend was looking into it, but I'll have a check around and make sure.

Definitely installing AdBlock into Firefox for her. My aunt is a little confused about whether it's Mozilla or Firefox that she has, but my father installed it for her and he's confirmed that it's Firefox. She *should* have the latest update for Firefox installed (apparently the update thingy came up recently) so I'll make sure it's sorted and protected up the whazoo when I've got all this cleared off.

[tejas.livejournal.com]

Firefox sits on a mozilla base. So, essentially, one and the same.

[selenay]

Yup, that was my understanding :-) But I wanted to check that I was dealing with familiar old Firefox rather than big bad Mozilla which might have minor differences and/or be even more pesky to sort out.

My loathing of all spyware/adware/malware authors knows no bound today. And tomorrow I will be going over there to attempt to fix all of this. Eeep!

[tejas.livejournal.com]

You will do fine. :-) And you will then be as a *god* to the hapless ones you've helped. :-)

[selenay]

*snort* My aunt definitely won't let me get delusions of godhood!

[selenay]

Thank you for the link! This is going to be...interesting.