Firefox Browser Hijack

For the first time since I've been using Firefox over the last few years I just suffered a browser hijack with it.

The symptoms were in the search pane any entry that Google or Yahoo etc. came up with was being re-directed, this happened the same day is it updated itself to v3.0.7, which I think was co-incidental rather than to do with the upgrade.

I was just browsing some pretty innocuous stuff when it started happening and not even pursuing my speciality of hunting down naked midget celebrity look-alikes either, before you start on me.

The cure is to use a utility to delete the associated dll's (which may morph into any filename on your machine apparently and appends random characters at the end) on the next reboot as they won't be deletable while windows is running. Depending on the file name you will find 3 similarly named .dll files and associated .dat file listed alphabetically in widows/system32 (I'm on XP pro) and there will be one in system32/drivers too. It's quite a new bit of malware that McAffee has only had listed in the last few days but it doesn't remove it other than from memory so it may help some of you that haven't got VC's that are aware or able to deal with it yet.

Also using the first 5 or 6 characters of the file name search the registry for any matching keys and make sure to delete them ALL.

When you reboot all should be well, as it was in my case at least, but check the .dlls or the reg entries haven't come back.

It didn't seem any more harmful than that but of course if it redirects you all over the place then who knows what it could invite in.