Automatic text-enhance??

[Gabriella Laurence 301887]

Cerbies, I am quite confused by something I noticed today while going through some of my old ads; there are links in several of my ads that I never put in!

 

For example:

http://www.cerb.ca/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=94259

 

"My donation for social dates will vary depending on how much time we will plan on spending together that day

(3 hours minimum) and if we also desire to spend intimate moments together before or after our social time."

 

 

If I click on 'social' or 'intimate', the links take me to match.com .

 

How do I stop it from happening again? Your help and suggestions will be much apprecated! Thank you :)

 

Gabby xox

[Kathryn Bardot 99339]

I don't see erroneous links in the original post - just the links you've put in on this post and the ones in the original that lead correctly (eg. zipline to the wiki page about ziplining).

If you're getting links to match.com, I would say run a virus scan - sounds like a browser hijack? Are you encountering this problem on a site other than cerb? Try googling something and see if the search links get redirected.

[Mister T 45020]

I checked as well and cant see erroneous links. Cant propose much more than what Amelia suggested.

[backrubman 64800]

Cerbies, I am quite confused by something I noticed today while going through some of my old ads; there are links in several of my ads that I never put in!

 

Yeah, you have some malware on your computer. Sometimes these things invite their friends to the party who in turn invite more friends.

[Gabriella Laurence 301887]

Ahhhh, silly me! I didn't even think about malware or running a virus scan.

 

Thank you for the replies! :)

[Athos 108589]

I've encountered this as well. Various malware, and also some browser ad ons, that link to specific words in websites you are looking at. Very annoying. Sometimes the ad ons are hidden in software updates.

 

Porthos

[backrubman 64800]

I've encountered this as well. Various malware, and also some browser ad ons, that link to specific words in websites you are looking at. Very annoying. Sometimes the ad ons are hidden in software updates.

Porthos

 

And very dangerous too. Browser high jacks can control what you see but they can also see what you submit on a form (like logging into CERB) so they end up with a lot more control than is immediately apparent.

 

So until you identify the exact variant and get rid of it and make sure there is no more (of another sort) one wonders what other evil things such malware might be silently doing.

 

I did catch a browser high jack phoning private data home once when I was monitoring network traffic for a business in the course of my duties at the time.

[Athos 108589]

And very dangerous too. Browser high jacks can control what you see but they can also see what you submit on a form (like logging into CERB) so they end up with a lot more control than is immediately apparent.

 

So until you identify the exact variant and get rid of it and make sure there is no more (of another sort) one wonders what other evil things such malware might be silently doing.

 

I did catch a browser high jack phoning private data home once when I was monitoring network traffic for a business in the course of my duties at the time.

 

What are your recommendations for good malware/spyware protection. I usually run malwarebytes and spybot search and destroy. One program doesn't seem to be enough.

 

Porthos

[Kathryn Bardot 99339]

I use Avast! anti-virus (it's free and pirate-y ;)) and Spybot Search + Destroy.

[backrubman 64800]

Malwarebytes is good also and Super Anti-SpyWare (but this one you have to be careful of as there are a couple of fake versions). So when looking for this stuff you even have to be careful to get the real deal (as opposed to a look alike) or you'll really learn how much malware bites :)

 

Often Spybot S & D will find something or nothing and then a second scan with malwarebytes will find more, you definitely can't trust just one program to find them all and in fact you no longer can trust all of them to find everything.

 

It's so bad I gave up on my Trader Workstation. I won't even check my email or do anything other then running the software I need to. Everything else is run under a VMware instance in a sandbox and I keep a copy of the "virtual" hard disk for the "virtual machine" so I just overwrite it once in a while. The equivalent of formatting the hard disk and re-installing but it only takes 20 seconds or so. Some stuff can't be removed easily at all.

[Athos 108589]

Thanks Backrubman and Amelia. I find the sane thing ... I usually run search and destroy followed by , each finds different things.

 

My workplace uses Mcafee but I've found in the past that lots seems to get past it. I've been using AVG, but it seems to be a bit of a resource hog. I've been thinking of trying avasti.

 

Porthos

[whiteman 14028]

I don't think it's malware, it might just be your web browser. I recall perhaps it was Internet Explorer which does this automatically and you have to disable a setting or something. I wish I could find a link for this, but I can't right now.

 

It may also be something that happens in other web browsers too.

[Athos 108589]

An article with some advice about dealing with the issue: http://wafflesatnoon.com/2011/10/05/seeing-unwanted-text-enhance-ads/

 

And another useful link: http://botcrawl.com/how-to-remove-text-enhance/

 

Porthos

[Gabriella Laurence 301887]

An article with some advice about dealing with the issue: http://wafflesatnoon.com/2011/10/05/seeing-unwanted-text-enhance-ads/

 

And another useful link: http://botcrawl.com/how-to-remove-text-enhance/

 

Porthos

I am at lost for words...

 

After trying the above, running Avast and Search & Destroy and having a qualified person check out my LP, I am still stuck with this awful malware that is making my LP behave in erratic ways! :(

 

Any more suggestions besides throwing my LP out the window?

 

Additional Comments:

I should add that I've looked into my ad-ons in both IE and Firefox and only the basic ad-ons are running.

The spam links also only seem to show up in IE.

[backrubman 64800]

I am at lost for words...

Any more suggestions besides throwing my LP out the window?

Additional Comments:

I should add that I've looked into my ad-ons in both IE and Firefox and only the basic ad-ons are running.

The spam links also only seem to show up in IE.

 

We find sometimes you can't get rid of these things on the drive you boot from, so we take the disk drive out, connect it to another machine and scan it with that one. Takes a technician to do this, particularly with a laptop.

 

You could try starting up a cmd line and then:

"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" -extoff

 

An expert sitting at the machine should be able to identify the exact variant and track down manual removal instructions, but sometimes after spending a certain amount of time on it we just have to backup the files you need, flatten it and reinstall the OS. That is of course the sure cure :) But most time consuming and inconvenient. And then you have lots of updates to reapply and quite a while until you get everything back the way you like it :(

[whiteman 14028]

If you want to scan your pc for malware without first booting into Windows, you'll have to download a virus rescue disk image. Like this one from AVG:

 

AVG | Rescue CD | PC Rescue and Repair Toolkit

 

You then burn the image to a CD or DVD blank disk, and then once that's done, you restart your computer with this disk in your optical drive, so you can boot from this environment. You then follow the instructions that come on screen.