Got some sort of virus on my laptop

[bankworking]

This is getting annoying.

So I get a popup that say's it detected something weird and suggests I run a system scan. Don't recognize it, so I ask my husband, who supposedly knows more about computers than I do, and he says to go ahead and run the scan. Well, it looks over my system and comes up with 6 items that it can't fix... but hit this purchase button for the scan update and then they'll be fixed.

This triggers my red alert, so I bug the hubby again, mentioning that I've heard of scams just like this, going from the side of the banker who people go to after they've gone and paid money to whoever and now want to try to dispute the charge.

So, x out of the first scan and try to pull up the basic windows scan... and it won't pull up. Won't let me even try the scan.

Well crap.

So ,I get the bright idea of trying a system restore. Take the settings back. Hubby agrees, and the restore at least works. But for some reason, when everything is said and done, I've lost my word documents that I had saved to a folder on my desktop, as well as a couple of files saved in paint. Still, after the system restore, I'm able to run the Windows Defender scan which finds a single trojan and gets rid of it for me.

Go online and check out my normal webcomics, using my bookmarks to get to them. Weird thing. I use firefox. Internet explorer keeps popping up behind it.

So, I decide I want to downloan spybot search and destroy. See if I still have something poking around. Put the words in the google searchbar in the corner of the window, get my list of websites, click on one... and I get re-directed. Okay. Google a site I know. Click on the website. Get redirected. Test it on my hubby's computer. Works just fine.

Type in the website url in the bar and get there just fine. Go through my google searchbar or google itself, and get redirected. (redirects to billparsons.com, findjittery.org, then a bunch of numbers, then on to somewhere else till it stops at some random-seeming page or alternate search-engine. Earlier it was redirecting differently, but I can't remember exactly.)

Fine. Get the url for spybot on my hubby's computer. Download it and run the scan. It finds a bunch of cookies. Doesn't fix the redirect problem.

So, I've pretty much exhausted my limited knowledge of things to do, maybe even made things worse with my fumbling. Feeling very close to hitting the shiny red reset button and just reformatting my hard drive.

Any ideas out there on what I might have done to myself?

And if I do reformat, does anyone know if it is likely to be safe to backup some of my files to a flashdrive so I don't lose them first? I'm a bit concerned about how a bunch of them disappeared on me. Managed to recover a few from the recent files saved in OpenOffice. I'd really like not to have to redo the documents, but I don't want to transport a virus through them, and I don't know enough to know if that's a reasonable worry or not.

[bankworking]

Also ran a scan using Housecall, but it didn't find any problems.

Think I'm going to turn it off and put things aside until I can get someone who knows more about it to help.

[Kogarashi]

I've had these exact symptoms before, about 2 or 3 years ago.

First: what sort of antivirus do you have on your computer? If you have none, may I recommend either AVG Free or Avast?

Second: I got rid of it by running MalwareBytes. Link: http://www.malwarebytes.org/ It's my go-to program for clearing these things off. It's how I cleaned up my system previously.

I would run it in Safe Mode, with the internet disabled if you can, just to make sure your virus problem is as gimped as you can manage. Do a full scan and make sure to wait for it to finish. Depending on your system, it could take a while.

Once MalwareBytes has run, then I would give Spybot and your (legit) antivirus of choice each a run to wipe up the dregs. Hopefully this should fix things.

Do you happen to remember the name of the fake alert that wanted you to buy the program/scan report before it would fix anything?

And for future reference, if you get a pop-up warning you about something weird and suggesting a system scan, never click within the pop-up itself, even if it looks like a legit Windows popup. Manually run your scans instead. It's kind of like getting those phishing e-mails that claim your Paypal account is compromised. You don't click the link in the e-mail, you go directly to the site yourself instead.

Best of luck!

[Geek King]

One thing to maybe get your files back:

Find the folder where they should be saved, and right click.

Select Properties.

Make sure the check box for "Hidden" is unchecked.

You might also go into Control Panel and open the Folder Options icon; Switch to the "View" tab, then make sure the option for "Show hidden files and folders" is marked.

One of the things these fake AVs have been doing lately is to hide your files and internet favorites by marking them hidden. These steps should help you unhide them, but you may need to go to each folder that was affected.

[bankworking]

Ran MalWareBytes, but it didn't find the problem either. Put on AVG (I didn't have an anti-virus on... part of my problem, and a mistake I will not repeat) but it couldn't find the trouble.

My father-in-law ran my system through several other scans, said the problem was that the virus was actually loading up before windows, making it hard to detect. Basically, as soon as I logged on, I had two copies of "internet explorer" running hidden that were affecting every web browser I tried to pull. Made any link I clicked on try to redirect, especially links from search engines.

He said there are some programs set up that can find virus's that deep also, but he told me that they weren't working either. His guess is that they weren't finding it because I set my system up to duel boot so I could boot into Windows or into Ubuntu, and that was helping to hide the problem.

Beyond me, really. Ended up hitting the shiny red reset button. Reformat seems to have fixed the problem, however much of a pain it is to reset everything. Ran AVG and Spybot first thing after reformat and immunized with Spybot (the virus wasn't letting me do that previously). I was able to get my files and get them saved to my flash drive. Made sure to run AVG on the flash also.

So,didn't fix the problem directly, but I'm doing my best to make certain it doesn't come back.

[bankworking]

Thanks for the advice all.