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.
Hello my name is Louise and I too have been highjacked.. and I cannot even get email from my web site.. I am licky to get to post here as it is redirecting me all the time.. I do not know what to do… I put that on my desk top and it allows me a short time to look for an answer then ther virus overtakes again… can anyone please help me.
GooredFix by jpshortstuff (08.01.10.1)
Log created at 11:57 on 28/06/2010 (Louise)
Firefox version 3.6.6 (en-GB)
========== GooredScan ==========
========== GooredLog ==========
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\extensions\
{399ad5b1-345a-e095-ff67-4cfe8ee41a21} [20:38 03/05/2010]
{972ce4c6-7e08-4474-a285-3208198ce6fd} [09:58 27/06/2010]
C:\Documents and Settings\Louise\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\op6sq2si.default\extensions\
{20a82645-c095-46ed-80e3-08825760534b} [05:19 27/04/2010]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Mozilla\Firefox\Extensions]
“{20a82645-c095-46ed-80e3-08825760534b}”=”C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Windows Presentation Foundation\DotNetAssistantExtension\” [22:20 15/08/2009]
“smartwebprinting@hp.com”=”C:\Program Files\HP\Digital Imaging\Smart Web Printing\MozillaAddOn3″ [02:23 08/03/2010]
———- Old Logs ———-
GooredFix[08.01.14_27-06-2010].txt
GooredFix[08.12.04_27-06-2010].txt
GooredFix[08.12.18_27-06-2010].txt
GooredFix[08.13.10_27-06-2010].txt
GooredFix[08.13.16_27-06-2010].txt
GooredFix[08.15.42_27-06-2010].txt
GooredFix[08.57.36_27-06-2010].txt
GooredFix[09.24.58_27-06-2010].txt
GooredFix[21.40.28_27-06-2010].txt
GooredFix[00.43.50_28-06-2010].txt
Smorgas Borgas
Works Great Thanks
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Mozilla Firefox – crashed
i deleted and tried to reinstalled mozilla firefox – and it will not do it
it keeps saying i need Network Frame. Yet from reading about network frameit seems that this has caused many of the problems we are having. Why hasn’t mozilla firefox made an update fixing this issue. Because i going to go back to internet explorer soon