Rugged Rock StudioThe Musings of Craig Lotter

I picked up a nasty virus infection on my main work development PC, running Windows Vista Business. I don’t know where or how it got picked up, but in all likelihood it was from a poisoned web page running some nasty Javascript payload that got in past a lax Microsoft Security Essentials. I noticed something amiss when all Google Image Search results stopped scrolling past page one of its ajax-loaded image results listing – across ALL my browsers! Then I began to notice that every now and then when I clicked on a Google search result, I would be automatically redirected to some or other advert site (like Groupon for example), instead of the search result on which I had clicked! And to top it all off, all of a sudden my machine became a lot more non-responsive than what it used to be, plus I was struggling to download and install certain Windows updates! Something was definitely up in other words! Scans from Microsoft Security Essentials and AVG turned up nothing, meaning I had to turn to Google with little more than the search term “google search results redirect virus” to go on. Luckily for me, this was more than enough. After a fair bit of research, I learned that the most likely culprit was a rootkit infection and to that extent I would need to try and sort it out using a different set of tools from what I had currently been making use of. The most visible [...]