Badmovies.org Forum

I have a virus or something.  When I go to any search engine and search for anything, a bogus search results page comes up.  All the links go to spam pages, i.e. if I search for "bad movies" I'll get a search result that says "bad movies" but when I click on it, I'll be taken to a popup ad for "Best Prices for 2008 BMWs" or other such nonsense.

Also, more disturbingly, this virus has blocked my access to any websites for antivirus or anti-spyware software.  I can't update my spyware removers or antivirus programs, nor can I access any websites to download any such programs.  For example, if I try to go to www.lavasoft.com, I'll either be instantly redirected to a spam page or I'll get "page cannot be displayed".

What can I do?  Am I just going to have to format and reinstall?

Try this: http://siri.urz.free.fr/Fix/SmitfraudFix_En.php

It can remove a lot of these system hijacking type malwares.

Read and follow the instructions on the page.

Let me know if you have any difficulty accessing the page due to the malware and I'll put the download on my site, with the instructions.

Thanks, Menard, but that didn't fix it.  I've been chasing this around all damn day. :hatred:

Try this: http://majorgeeks.com/downloads31.html

You can download definitions (updated) for ad-aware to manually update them. Check out some of the other programs as well.

See if you can get a name for the malware, or the main website with which it seems to be connected, and do a Google search to see if somebody may have a fix for it.

The redirects could be as simple as a changed windows hosts file.  On most windows systems there is a file called "hosts" that contains local DNS address information.  If the malware modified that file it could be what is preventing you from getting to those security sites.

For Windows 2000 and newer, the hosts file can be found at:

\%SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\ (where the %SystemRoot% will often be C:\windows

You can open the hosts file with notepad.  More than likely, the only actual entry should be this one:

127.0.0.1       localhost

If you see other entries they will probably be for the blocked security sites.

The malware also could have changed the registry key for the hosts file, but I think its more likely it replaced the original than did that.

Nothing seems to work.  I guess I'll just have to take it in to get fixed.  I suppose I could just format and reinstall everything.  I have anything important backed up to an external drive.

I'm not sure how bad off you are but you might want to try this. This seems to fix everything and if you can get lucky enough to get to it, it may help you.

http://www.download.com/Malwarebytes-Anti-Malware/3000-8022_4-10804572.html?tag=mncol&cdlPid=10896905

Well, I'm back.  I ended up formatting and reinstalling.  It took all day to update Windows, IE, and all my anti-spyware and anti-virus programs to where they were before.

Can't quite get my ATI graphics card to work; I'm using the default graphics driver for now.