Yesterday I posted about the problems I have been having with my computer, mostly unwanted pop-ups.
I am having trouble with Firefox and it's a problem that started this morning after my mother turned on the computer and opened the program. Whenever Firefox is open, I get pop-ups that I never used to get. They aren't pop-ups that appear when I click on a link. They are pop-ups that appear out of nowhere.
In addition, I'm getting a strange thing happening when I perform a Google search and get my search results. When I click on a link I am immediately taken to a new search engine (whose name I won't mention here for obvious reasons). I am able to get to my desired page by clicking the back button and then clicking on the link a second time.
As It turns out, there wasn't a problem with Firefox per-se. Instead, my computer has been infected with the Virtumonde Trojan Horse, a nasty program that causes pop-ups to appear. It apparently also can block the Microsoft Update process. See here for more details. I spent the morning running spyware and anti viral programs (with my internet service disconnected), then restarting my computer, and then repeating that process.
I am not sure how my computer got infected, but it probably got infected on Sunday at some point. My kids spent a good portion of the day playing online games at various sites, and it's possible they unknowingly downloaded the program.
So far, I haven't had a problem with the pop-ups since I last rebooted. I was able to run a Google search and did not have the problem I was having yesterday. Hopefully I have solved the problem, but I know better than to get too excited at the moment.