I usually don’t believe in computer viruses (ie trojans, malware etc) – they attack people with less than average knowledge of computers. Having graduated from computer science and now working as a Software consultant, I like to think that I know a thing or two about computers.

So last night when I logged into my personal computer and noticed that all search hits on Google were taking me to an advertising site, I was hurt. I couldn’t believe that I made the grave mistake of accepting malware. Stupidity. How could I? To makes matters worse, I had uninstalled my expired Norton Antivirus a week ago. Although useless for new threats, it could have prevented this one.

Browser hijacking is, at least in the way I experienced it last night, an interesting problem. Since my search results on Google or dare I say Bing, were filtered and redirected to an advertising site, I couldn’t simply search for a virus remover application and click on a link. So around 11:30pm last night, I copied the link location of many search hits and pasted it to my web browser. But it was not this easy still. If a site forwarded me to an external site (e.g., a download link hosted on another server) – I would have to copy this link location as well.

Around 12:20am, I had exhausted many solutions that had worked for people. I tried:

• SUPERAntiSpyware
• SpyBot
• Manual remedies such as clearing DNS cache
• Online virus removers

But none of them worked until I tried MalwareBytes. This is an amazing Anti-Malware application. It not only found more problems compared to SUPERAntiSpyware and SpyBot but it also didn’t ask me to reboot my computer.

I took a preventive step also – an attribute of my old age – and installed free Anti Virus software licensed for UofT affiliates.