help? vandal's – been hacked i think? – sweetpacks search bar

[Anonymous]

g’day all,

hoping for some help please.

coincidentally when i opened ALS site yesterday this sweetpack web page popped up at the same time, i just simply closed the page, and later i realised i had this terrible search bar, which doesn’t show anywhere that we can find, so can’t uninstall it.

up dated spybot and malwarebytes and ran scans no help there got new avaste up date and scanned no help there.

can anyone help please? we even did 2 restores back to middle of last month that didn’t help.

tried this link his help was no help.

only affecting firefox

many thanks in advance

len

[Hummer]

Have you gone into where you uninstall software/programs.. in My Computer (I think) … I have a Mac & it’s been a while since I have used a PC.

Try looking for the unwanted toolbar in there to remove.

[Anonymous]

yep been there humbug was first stop looking for the toolbar, also did a search and it does not show anywhere.

new thing i get a http500 error when i try to open hotmail, which i now can’t open, wish these people would use their abilities for the betterment of mankind.

ta

len

[Lady Bee]

Have you tried to google “sweetpack toolbar”?

The first page has lots of links asking the same question. Hopefully one of the ideas will work for you.

[Bobbee]

Hi Len,

Good luck with that! Damb nuisance….and often more than just a nuisance. :ohmy:

[Anonymous]

this morning my machine is unusable it has taken over, i realy hope that teh dim wit who did this is enjoying teh results of his/her immature vandalism. thing is they protect themselves from any opinion coming back to them, but maybe not no pleasure if you can’t see your victim writhing.

anyhow at this stage looks like costing money we don’t have to fix

one thing as abeliever in God i could never stoop so low

do unto others as you would have them do unto you

so at present we are lost

we’ve run 5 registery spyware programs and our virus protection, which should have stopped this anyway

ta

len

[Lady Bee]

Did you try any of the suggestions you found when you did a Google search?

[Anonymous]

yes i have been wroking through them all but can go no further now

most where finding items usually 2 each and we fixed them as per program but none of the items related to sweetpaks

i hope no one else cops this from anyone it is the lowest of acts

ta

len

[Snags]

5 Spambot search and destroys arent going to do anything but trip each other up.

Pick a favourite and lose the rest

Do you use Internet Explorer?

if so switch

Mozilla(its free) has addblock and Noscript which are pretty good and both free add ons that stop a lot of this hijacking.

[Anonymous]

i cannot now get into my computer to have teh luxury uninstally firefox

can’t even us safe mode

good fun so far looks like low level repair at anywhere from $80 to $230

someones fun someone elses loss

i was only doing what i was told.

looks too late now

len

[purplehat]

Hey Len,

Before giving the computer to someone else to fix, there’s another thing you can do.

You obviously have internet with another computer at the moment? Please try and download the Avira Rescue System. http://www.avira.com/en/download/product/avira-antivir-rescue-system

It’s free. 🙂

If you know how to make a CD with a .ISO file, use that.. otherwise, download the .EXE and it’ll help you I think. You make a CD with it on a computer that isn’t infected, then you start your infected computer with the Avira CD in the drive. You may have to start the Bios when you first start the computer and tell it to start using the CD first, or maybe you have a “boot menu” that you need to press something to access when it first starts up? It’s not easy for me to explain, but you need to start the computer using the CD, not the hard drive.

If you do that, the Avira Rescue System will start up instead of Windows and you can scan your system from there. It’s awesome because some virus/malware/root kits that won’t be visable normally will show up in this way. Then you can rename the offending files and all should be better. Mind you, that can depend on how much damage was done, too.. and you may need to run a System File Check in Windows once you can log back in.

So far, I’ve not met a computer that wasn’t fixable in this way. One of my pet peeves is people who “repair” computers by simply reinstalling the OS. Not nice.

And Snags is right. Have only one virus program running on your computer. Having more than one running at the same time actually let viruses in!

[Anonymous]

thanks purplehat,

maybe we are getting somewhere, we have managed to delete firefox

just can’t inistal ad-aware as it is running and we can’t find how to stop it running.

have come back to regular spyware, reg cleaner and anti-virus

so far machine running ok no sign of sweetpack

i’ll keep record of you suggestion in case all flops again.

big ta

len

[barefoot_misty]

Hi Len, with the adaware, can you just hit control, alt, delete and find it in the processes and kill it, it will give you a warning, i can’t remember what ( i don’t use windows anymore ) but just ignore it and kill the process, you should then be able to uninstall it.

[Anonymous]

i hace tried ctrl/alt/del and noting is running in the first window

will try again booting up offline now

len

[Anonymous]

we booted up off line ran task manager(ctrl/alt/del) found ad-aware and shut it down, then went to uninstall software in the control panel, it will only give us change or repair option, we go into tree and program files trye deleting it says file is being used by another program so can’t delete untill w close oterh program which at a guess is sweetpack??

len

[Author]

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