After running a search in google, yahoo, etc., I'll click on a link to take me to the website, but I'm always redirected to some other, unconnected, page, often an ad.
To follow up on the above: If I want to go to the site, I have to type the address in the browser space. This has been going on for several months. In the beginning, it didn't happen as often; I would have times where I would search on google (mostly), click on a link, be redirected, run the search again (because once I was on the redirected page, I could not use the back browser arrow) and click on the link and be taken to the website I wanted. But it became more frequent, and now it happens all of the time. Firefox also runs slow for me, often becomes unresponsive and has to close. More recently than not, it opens to a "Restore Session" page. I have McAfee Security on my computer, and after spending over an hour with their tech support reloading their security suite and removing a whole bunch of temporary files from my computer, the problem was still there. I don't know if it is my computer or what the problem is, but I appreciate any insight you have. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
All Replies (1)
Sounds like you have a link hijacker installed which McAfee doesn't find for some strange reason. What I suggest you do is to go to Malwarebytes and download the free version of the program. Then after you install it, update it via the link (tab) you'll see at the top and finally run a complete system scan.
It's possible McAfee didn't ask you to disable Windows System Restore. That Microsoft utility which is part of the operating system makes backups of all executables including malware unfortunately.
To be sure, I'd advise you to disable it temporarily by right clicking My Computer, then go to Properties and click the System Restore tab. Then place a checkmark in the box which says "Disable System Restore on all drives" and then click Apply/OK. This will delete all your Restore points, but it's the only way to remove malware which Windows is inadvertently making backups of.
It would be advisable to do that before you run a scan.
Once the Malwarebytes scan terminates and has quarantined anything it finds, you can re-enable System Restore again by removing the checkmark.
Sorry it took so long to respond to your question by the way.
Modified by Xircal