A malaware attack..

Recently my laptop(Vista SP2) came under a malaware attack. I got redirected from one site to page which was resembling a progressing virus scan in the Windows Explorer. I closed this page, but it somehow managed to download few things on my machine. One of them was a kind of  security tool, indicating something wrong on my machine in the task bar. It was running an executable named like some big number. It was running off c:\program data folder. I killed the executable and got rid of that folder . After this was done, Norton virus scan dialog box came up. It was essentially asking me to buy Norton. I don't have, never had Norton on my machine. It looks, what ever got installed on my machine installed Norton as well ( I was surprised with this). I uninstalled Norton. I thought everything is gone and I am good.

Next day when I started browsing, I noticed clicking any link on any website was taking me to some advertising sites. I was shocked with this.At this point I went to famous No Script for Firefox. It showed me there is a host which is doing all this. That host was google-analystiks.us. I didn't notice this at the first glance as it is very similar to the Google Analytics. I think this was introduced by the malaware.

I have McAffee installed on my machine. I ran a scan and it didn't help. After that I came across a tool called MalawareBytes. A quick scan of this tool found the malaware and quarantined it. This tool looked very efficient. It completed a quick scan of the PC in about 8-10 minutes and found the malaware.

Information about this tool can be found here http://download.cnet.com/Malwarebytes-Anti-Malware/3000-8022_4-10804572.html

Since then the sytem is looking good, I haven't experienced automatic redirects to advertising sites. Hope fully its recovered husssssh.

I always use NoScript with Firefox, I uninstalled it for few days because of some issue and ran into this. I got NoScript back again and hopefully don't have to uninstall it again.

Thanks
Prasad Pimparkar