adwcleaner

I don't clean up virus infections much anymore. I don't get viruses and I don't fix computers for people much anymore. Anyway my younger brother asked me to look at his laptop because all of his searches were being redirected. Sure enough there was some crappy pc optimization software running with a bunch of toolbars and something called browser protector installed.

I set this pc up. He was running an auto updated windows 7 with MSE and google chrome. I was surprised his pc was this screwed up. Anyway the first thing I did was run MBAM but nothing showed up! I was pretty surprised. The searches were being redirected through something called delta search but they were actually going through yahoo.

I uninstalled all the programs showing in add/remove programs. IE and Chrome were still hijacked. I did a quick search and found this program:

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/adwcleaner/

It was a simple self contained program that required me to just press delete and everything was back to normal. If you help people out a lot this might be one to keep on your flash drive.(I don't do this much anymore so maybe everyone already knew about it)

thanks for the heads-up.

I've added it to my toolkit and will let you know how I find it.

rridgely & mta you should also check this thread: http://forum.pirifor...showtopic=38148

Talk about similar products; Avast Browser Cleanup Tool, ADWCleaner and JRT.

another similar-ish software I've used for years is cwshredder, small, quick and concise.

it one of those programs I 'get lucky' with every once in a while, it'll find something that will amazingly be related to the problem and remove it.

I haven't used cwshredder for years.

I think other security software has overtaken that now.

@hazel,

I thought so too (about others replacing it) and they have, but every once in a while, after running all the usual scans with AV's, MBAM, CC, (you know the list), if some unexplained 'bug' still persists, I'll run cwshredder and bugger me if it doesn't (not always) find some extra crap. now, finding and removing that may not help, but it's good to see it still finds things that the others have missed.

and it's old as the hills too, been on v2.19 for years.

Yeah cwshredder is old at this point. I don't think it can hurt to run it other than the time it takes(which is almost none).

I would be shocked if other programs didn't find what its looking for though. I think you might find some stray registry keys or something. I would be hesitant running it on newer versions of windows though. Probably safe but also probably not "officially supported".

I've had a chance to run adwcleaner on a few PC's now, it's like cwshredder in the sense that it's picking up things others don't.

as an example, it's finding ask toolbar & conduit crap in the registry that my other full scans haven't.

so that's good / alarming.

I need to test it on some of my test rigs, running all my toolkit progs to prove it's not a PICNIC problem (Problem In Chair Not In Computer)

adwcleaner is used by almost all the big malware removal forums to clean up all the toolbar type related things and entries that infected users often have on their machines.