Help! Why does my searches redirect to other search engines? And how do I solve this problem? Free antivirus?

Question

First off I am curious as to why I keep getting redirected whenever I use a search engine. I started noticing this yesterday. I guessed that it was some sort of virus/spyware/adware (what is the correct term for this)?

So... I downloaded Ad-Aware and used Sophos to get rid of Mal/Enc-Pk-Cz and other things. However, Ad-Aware has always crashed whenever I try to quarantine whatever it scans.

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, the problem still persists... albeit less frequent. So, can you recommend me a free virus/spyware/whatever program to get rid of this and other things that might be infecting my computer? Thank you so much.

Answer 1

You got spyware that redirect your search.

Install spybot.

Spybot is an anti-spyware tool that is free and contains many features.

http://www.safer-networking.org/

Spybot immunize your computer against some spyware.

It modifies Internet Explorer to block a lot of the bad stuff known to Spybot.

There is a second layer of protection for IE that blocks anything that should come through by different aspects.

Spybot Resident a tool which check permanently running application to protect your system.

Spybot Resident TeaTimer is a tool which perpetually monitors the processes called/initiated and immediately detects known malicious processes.

It giving you some options how to deal with this process in the future:

You can set TeaTimer to be informed when the process tries to start again automatically kill the process or generally allow the process to run

There is also an option to delete the file associated with this process.

In addition, TeaTimer detects, when something wants to change some critical registry keys. TeaTimer can protect you against such changes again giving you an option: You can either Allow or Deny the change.

Spybot host file locking is a tool which locks the hosts file to prevent unauthorized changes.

Locking the hosts file will prevent most hosts hijackers (even unknown) from doing harm;

Locking the IE settings will prevent other users of your computer to change your preferences.

Spybot ActiveX is a tool to display a list of installed ActiveX applications it will display a green checkmark in front of ActiveX applications known as legitimate,

and a red sign in front if applications known as illegitimate

Spybot process list is a tool displays a list of all currently running processes,

including some information about them. It also allows you to kill some processes

Spybot System startup tool lists all programs that are started at Windows startup.

If those items are in the database coming with Spybot, it will display some more information about them.

It also allows you to disable (and enable) items, as well as delete them, change them or insert new items.  

Spybot system internal is a registry cleaner that fix error in windows registry.

Answer 2

AVG Free Version 8.0. It is a great anti-virus program that works quite well. You can get it from grisoft.com or from download.com. I also suggest Spybot Search and Destroy. It scans quite often, but this is highly modifiable. AdAware can be used as a good spyware backup program, but Spybot tends to look at AdAware and says it is spyware. You can ignore this, but review any other risks. Make sure these programs are updated frequently and scan often. Good luck!