Browser Hijackers

[Mia]

This is mainly a rant, I've just spent the last two days destroying a browser hijacker on Firefox. This somewhat clever trojan would not allow me to download anything related to removing it. It also disabled my two anti-virus, firewall, malware programs which when I scanned the system detected nothing. I kept getting a warning about one of my ports being used, I shut it down.

Anything I did online related to visibly detecting the darn thing (I still don't know exactly what kind of trojan it was) caused my browser to redirect to bogus pages, the bogus pages were all sorts of things, computer virus scanners, pages where they immediately came online and wanted to chat about the problems with my browser.

Some fake microsoft pages, badly written, some actually naming the searched for terms, like dounty or zwiiky.

The browser trojan allowed me to go to regular sites, but nothing related to malware removal. My husband's computer is not networked to mine, so, I destroyed the trojan offline with a downloaded program on a memory stick/usb key.

I blottoed the thing over and over, and my system is clean. I tested all the ports and nothing is getting sent out that I don't want to be. Phew, have you ever had a browser hijacker? This is my second one in twenty years, and this one was a lot more difficult to remove.

 

[RidingDutchman]

I have had some issues with adware and such, got something that sounds like the one you had as well about a year ago.

I have a program named CrapCleaner (CCleaner) on my PC, this lets me delete installed programs like that fairly easily so far. Run a scan with security essentials afterwards and always seemed to solve it. Viruses can be real buggers if you don't know how to handle them...

(Had to once completely reinstall my aunts PC, virus put 5 bogus virusscans on the PC, nothing on the browser was useful whatsoever and the virus itself had installed around 52 different pieces of software, instead of chasing them all down with CCleaner we just removed windows and reinstalled the entire PC because they didn't really have anything on it that that wanted to keep)

 

[Bro'Freak]

I use Malware Bytes Anti-Malware available from https://www.malwarebytes.org/ (No need for the trial realy)
- I've used it many times as a stand alone cleaner.
If the above fails and you want to be a bit more sure that you've given it a good clean try ComboFix available from
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/combofix/
Hope these help.