Hello everyone, yesterday I discovered that I have some kind of virus on the computer I'm currently using. My browsers are infected in some way, although one is not as bad as the other. I'm going to detail my problem and what steps I've taken to try solve it on my own, so I apologize in advance for the very long post! CURRENTLY:
Google Chrome (browser I normally use) is usable, however occasionally a new window will open by itself, which I am able to close and everything is fine. It's just a minor inconvenience.
Internet Explorer (browser my Mother uses) is pretty much unusable. Whenever it is opened, it goes to the home page and 2-3 other windows open that say "HTTP 400 - Bad Request" and in the address bar is http://auto.search.msn.com/response.asp?MT= [a bunch of random characters, I don't want to post the whole thing]. It's possible to close these windows, but if anything is done on the main browser more of them will start popping up.
The problem used to be worse in both browsers. The reason I discovered something was wrong was because after using Chrome for a couple hours yesterday, my computer started to get slow. I opened up the task manager and saw that there were around 20 "chrome.exe" processes even though I only had two tabs open, and have no browser addons or extensions in Chrome. I tested Internet Explorer after this, and the new windows I mentioned earlier that opened would always create additional windows if I did anything with them and just multiply, so the only way to actually remove them was to delete every "iexplore" process in the task manager.
I ran a virus scan on SuperAntiSpyware, which surprisingly came up with nothing because the computer was obviously infected and I've gotten good results with SAS in the past. I then downloaded Malwarebytes because I've used the program for issues on other computers and it worked great, then I rebooted the computer into safe mode.
After running a scan it found around 30 items (Adware, Trojans, Trojan-dropper, etc) all of which I quarantined AND deleted after rebooting my computer again. In normal mode, I ran another scan. It came up with 300+ items (yes, 300) almost all of which were titled "PUP.optional" along with 1-2 more adware things. After discovering those last couple adware viruses I thought the problem was finally solved, so I quarantined everything and restarted my computer yet again. I did NOT delete any of these items (including the adware) from the quarantine yet as some of them were labelled as being registry keys and I was afraid deleting them completely may cause additional problems.
So after all that was done, the major problem seems to be gone but as mentioned at the top of this post, the problem still persists although not nearly as bad as before. Using the internet is easily manageable in Chrome but obviously I don't want to ignore it and possibly let it get worse. I have logs from my Malwarebytes scans if they are helpful in any way, but at this point I'm not sure what steps to make to completely get rid of this virus. Thank you in advance for any help!
Google Chrome (browser I normally use) is usable, however occasionally a new window will open by itself, which I am able to close and everything is fine. It's just a minor inconvenience.
Internet Explorer (browser my Mother uses) is pretty much unusable. Whenever it is opened, it goes to the home page and 2-3 other windows open that say "HTTP 400 - Bad Request" and in the address bar is http://auto.search.msn.com/response.asp?MT= [a bunch of random characters, I don't want to post the whole thing]. It's possible to close these windows, but if anything is done on the main browser more of them will start popping up.
The problem used to be worse in both browsers. The reason I discovered something was wrong was because after using Chrome for a couple hours yesterday, my computer started to get slow. I opened up the task manager and saw that there were around 20 "chrome.exe" processes even though I only had two tabs open, and have no browser addons or extensions in Chrome. I tested Internet Explorer after this, and the new windows I mentioned earlier that opened would always create additional windows if I did anything with them and just multiply, so the only way to actually remove them was to delete every "iexplore" process in the task manager.
I ran a virus scan on SuperAntiSpyware, which surprisingly came up with nothing because the computer was obviously infected and I've gotten good results with SAS in the past. I then downloaded Malwarebytes because I've used the program for issues on other computers and it worked great, then I rebooted the computer into safe mode.
After running a scan it found around 30 items (Adware, Trojans, Trojan-dropper, etc) all of which I quarantined AND deleted after rebooting my computer again. In normal mode, I ran another scan. It came up with 300+ items (yes, 300) almost all of which were titled "PUP.optional" along with 1-2 more adware things. After discovering those last couple adware viruses I thought the problem was finally solved, so I quarantined everything and restarted my computer yet again. I did NOT delete any of these items (including the adware) from the quarantine yet as some of them were labelled as being registry keys and I was afraid deleting them completely may cause additional problems.
So after all that was done, the major problem seems to be gone but as mentioned at the top of this post, the problem still persists although not nearly as bad as before. Using the internet is easily manageable in Chrome but obviously I don't want to ignore it and possibly let it get worse. I have logs from my Malwarebytes scans if they are helpful in any way, but at this point I'm not sure what steps to make to completely get rid of this virus. Thank you in advance for any help!
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