A few weeks back I was using Google Chrome to browse the net, and then my firewall went nuts — it appeared as though all kinds of bugs were installing themselves on my system, and I couldn’t stop them. Well, after running several different anti-spyware, adware, and anti-virus utilities, my PC was labeled as “clean”, but I still had a problem — my Google searches were hijacked in the Firefox browser. Something strange was showing in my statusbar when I performed a search in Google via Firefox, most notably, “v1.adwarefeed.com”. It was super-annoying because I couldn’t search with Google, my primary search engine, with my primary web browser, Firefox.
So, after a ton of continual searching, I finally found the answer that worked for me. Apparently, the “v1.adwarefeed.com” is only on portion of the problem — it’s a part of an infection coined “Goored” and it exploits several search engines on Firefox — Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN, and even AOL searches. The result appears to be just an annoyance rather than a security exploit — when you’re searching for something via one of the above search engines, the results pages are hijacked, and you’re redirected to a variety of websites, undoubtedly so that the infector can benefit financially.
In any case, as the fix to this solution has been obscured from me up until recently, I wanted to add a bit of context to this post so that others, too, could potentially find the solution to this problem. In other words, my long-windedness here has a point — I want others to find a solution to the Firefox / Google redirect hijack problem as well.
I found the solution on this page:
How To Remove clickfraudmanager, adwarefeed, zfsearch Firefox Redirect – SpyWare BeWare!
Because I couldn’t find anything else on this topic, at least that worked, here’s a screen capture of the tutorial on how to fix this Firefox search hijack problem / infection: (this is a big file — 400k+)
Here’s the file used to identify, and clean up the infection(s):
PLEASE NOTE:
Using this tool may have unintended consequences. Personally, I had to remove Google Gears from Firefox after running this tool as I couldn’t upload the above image without Firefox crashing unexpectedly. I have no idea if this problem was due to using the suggested fix or not, but I’m just throwing this out there just in case. I can now use Google to search via Firefox, and I haven’t noticed any other issues presenting themselves, but I suggest that you do a system backup before using this tool, just in case.