Why do all that work when an anti virus would stop it from even getting that far more often than not?

Oh, this was like four years ago; it's long gone now. And like I said, Malwarebytes wasn't getting it. That just made me even more paranoid because Malwarebytes was supposed to be one of the best programs out there, but every time I ran the scan... nothing. Even though nothing seems to be wrong with any of my computers right now, I still don't fully trust the scan results of any antivirus program.

There are a lot of varieties of search engine redirects out there, but the one I had was a trojan that would redirect every result to about five different URLs before landing on an innocuous-looking page like the Yellow Pages website. I believe the purpose of it was to collect ad revenue from those in-between page hits. Every well-known search engine from Google to Yahoo was affected. The cause turned out to be an infected atapi.sys file which was resolved by Combofix.

I'm sure any modern AV program would detect this thing instantly now since it's so old.

Unless I am getting it mixed with AVG ... I forget. No, I remember not liking AVG.

The Black Shadow wrote:

I suppose I see your points. I have re installed Avast.

If you are worried about your antivirus annoying you with pop-ups and such, I'd like to suggest either Kaspersky (paid) or Microsoft Security Essentials (free). Those are just my personal favorites, I'm sure there are other good ones out there. I use MSE and it is very unintrusive and works well in the background.

I used to use Kaspersky, actually. My mother has a paid version of the 2013 version, but I don't know if I were to install it that I could receive a free upgrade I was able to when I had it on another computer. But as for Microsoft Security essentials, I personally wouldn't feel safe with it. And if I'm not mistaken it's built into Windows 8.

For now I'm content with Avast.

It's probably worth noting that I've been pretty paranoid about this kind of thing ever since I got that unexplained virus. It was one of those search engine redirectors, so nothing too serious, but I was still scared that if that could get on my computer without me knowing, worse stuff probably could too. Now I use ad-ons that block ads and scripts, and even have an antivirus on my phone, and I still can't even honestly guarantee that any of my computers are completely clean.

I also worked at the school IT helpdesk in college, and I saw some pretty messed up computers, haha. And this was on a network that required an antivirus to even get online.

I can smell a virus on a lenght of one mile. Not just through performance decrease, even by processes which cannot be closed (restarts 3 seconds after killing it) or having suspicious names. (just like stij.exe (that's a one big piece of annoying malware)), i have some average experience with malware, adwares, worms. I'm using only MalwareBytes and AdwCleaner (among a few sysinternals), and that's good enough for me.

Stormy, if your search engine has been redirected to some crap (like snap.do/do-search) then i recommend you to download AdwCleaner from Xplode Team's official website and delete everything it detects. (Folders, files, services, substituted shortcuts, registry keys/values, everything) .And if you want something to scan for viruses then download MalwareBytes and quick-scan (MB is free (best if you download Chameleon addon for it, it makes it impossible for a malware to become "Invincible" for MB) Some viruses use that option. "Kryptik" is just the worst thing i can think of for you to catch >.<

I suppose I see your points. I have re installed Avast.

If you are worried about your antivirus annoying you with pop-ups and such, I'd like to suggest either Kaspersky (paid) or Microsoft Security Essentials (free). Those are just my personal favorites, I'm sure there are other good ones out there. I use MSE and it is very unintrusive and works well in the background.

I also worked at the school IT helpdesk in college, and I saw some pretty messed up computers, haha. And this was on a network that required an antivirus to even get online.