Friday, October 1, 2010

Friday October 1st

Today I got to troubleshoot two equally annoying problems, one caused by a virus and the other caused by AVG.

Starting with the virus, my customer had the infamous GALA Google re-director virus. What this one does is redirects any attempt to use Google to a web page from GALA that looks similar to Google's but is an obvious spoof.
Malwarebytes will easily clean out the virus; which my customer handled before I got there, but some users(like my customer) will still experience forwarding to this annoying site when using the search engine found at the top right of your browser space.


The way to fix this is by left clicking on the arrow next to the magnifying glass and choosing "manage search engines"

Once there you'll need to delete your default search engine by defaulting another engine and then choosing your original one and deleting it. After that you'll need to close the window, click on the arrow next to the magnifying glass again and choose "find search providers"(or something to that effect). Choose your provider and re-install them. Doing this will remove the infected search engine and install a new clean one in its place.

My next customer had a problem with downloading files from IE/Firefox and downloading attachments from emails. "not enough disc space" was the common message, and if 200+GB of free space isn't enough for a single file, I don't know what is! The cause of this error is an anti virus program, since the program was denying the downloads the computer gave a default(and way off the mark) reason for the denied download.

The simple fix? remove any active anti virus software you have installed and find a new provider. My customer had AVG 8.5, after uninstalling that I was able to pull attachments from emails and download from IE8. From there I reinstalled AVG 9.0 and everything continued to work smoothly.

20 comments:

Nerd Life said...

Thanks for reading my tech posts! I have more to come!

The Square Circle said...

I had the redirect virus twice. two strains i guess.

hitman pro took care of both of them.

DailyTechnician said...

Ive heard lots of good things about Hitman, might be added to my anti-virus arsenal soon...

Allen said...

I don't really like AVG. For a free antivirus, I use Avast!, and for paid I use Kapersky. Both good.

Ceedo said...

How about some stories of troublesome customers?

anon1337 said...

Very helpful, thanks.

The Reviever said...

Never heard about such a problem, thanks for the info.

J said...

cool blog! hoping to see more of your technical solutions since I've always been interested in that kind of stuff. Keep it up

Gicioch said...

Allen: never use avast!, better pay for Nod or something like that and be sure you're safe.

And to our blogger - I don't like AVG either. :P

Deso said...

Nice tech life.

Archivist X0042 said...

good way to start the month huh?

Slumph said...

useful =]

nice, really. you should check out my chill music post on my music blog.

My internet explortion said...

The only virus I ever got was a keylogger but it was annoying to remove. Good post

ikatashi said...

antivirus is the worst, the only real antivirus security is not being stupid

max said...

AVG is good for free :) but I rather crack some payable AVs xD

NerfQuake said...

Thank you for the information, I look forward to seeing more for sure!

zG Chris said...

AVG saves my life.

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Mr. Magnet said...

Malwayrebytes is awesome. Saves me when my Common Sense 2010 fails.

killerkun said...

wow, you make it sound so easy