Google Redirects To Another Site

March 13, 2012
Leave a comment

So I came across this problem the other day and thought I would say what I did to resolve this problem. The computer would load certain websites OK like yahoo, espn, and bing. But would not load Google or AOL facebook and many others. I first ran a malwarebytes scan which found a couple of things and after cleaning things up and restarting the computer, I was still unable to load the Google homepage.

After some more research I found that when I ping google.com it was coming back with a 87.139 ip address range. I checked the host file and didn’t see anything abnormal. So after checking out a few more things and further research I determined the computer had a rootkit and was redirecting all these websites to a different IP. I downloaded and ran TSSKiller.exe  which found a rootkit and was able to successfully remove it. After another restart I was able to access Google and other sites with no problem.

Hopes this helps anyone as this was a tricky one to figure out.

RG

Vista Has Missing Desktop Icons and Documents

September 21, 2011
2 Comments

I came across this issue yesterday and wanted to let you know what I found and how you can go about fixing this.  The computer I saw this on was running Windows Vista but I imagine it could also happen on windows 7 or XP.  Anyways, I found that the laptop had a virus and this virus had hidden all the desktop, documents, and other files and folders to make it look like you had lost everything on your computer.  The first thing you need to do is make sure your anti virus program is up to date and run a full scan.  After that you should also go to http://malwarebytes.org/ and downloand and run a full scan of this also.  Once you know for sure you have gotten rid of the virus and or malware you can now download unhide.exe from http://download.bleepingcomputer.com/grinler/unhide.exe . Download this program and run it.  It may take sometime to run but once it’s done you should hopefully be able to see your files on the desktop and under the Documents folder.  **NOW GO BUY A BACKUP DRIVE AND BACKUP YOUR DATA!**.  You will have hopefully learned a lesson here and realize that you got lucky but next time it could be worse.  So please go buy a backup drive or use a service such as Mozy and backup your data today.

I hope this helps you as it can be a really scary to turn on your computer and think you have just lost everything. 

RG