Every hyperlink on my system takes me to any other site

[Anahera]

Friend of mine's XP Pro machine has gotten something really nasty. Any hyperlink that is clicked on takes you somewhere other than the link's address. This happens in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. PC has Zone Alarm Security Suite installed. Doing a full virus/malware scan with it finds nothing. MalwareBytes' Anti-Malware found a couple pieces of adware and a single Trojan, killed them all. Ad-Aware found two pieces of adware, killed them. Not considering whatever thing strange within the IE or FF add-ons. I can’t run an online scan through somewhat similar to Trend Micro's House call, for the reason that clicking on a link to it takes me anywhere else.

[GhostRider]

Some of the c-rapware that messes with DNS can be fixed by running a Hijack This scan and deleting the Registry Entries that product turns up for DNS servers. Alas the last bunch of c-rap that I've run into manages to outwit Hijack This, MalwareBytes, and Super Antispyware via a root kit and an infected driver file having to do with the ATA part of the hard-drive. On the most recent system I encountered this c-rap the installed Norton product tagged the infected file as Backdoor.

[arturro]

Probably the best thing to do is backup user data and start over that way you knows the system is clean. I did run the Kaspersky Rescue Disk on at least two systems having this sort of misdirected search results and it has found the infected driver file along with other stuff. Kaspersky did fix the infected file (note it is an infected driver file and it must be repaired and not deleted as the system will subsequently not boot if you delete the file).

[Zacharia]

2008 version which so far as I know is the latest you can get unless you have an installed copy of Kaspersky and utilize it to make a Rescue Disk. I would simply run it on top of a system that is pre-2008 vintage. The downloaded file is an ISO which require be burned toward a CD. You then boot from the CD on the infected system. The software should tell you the virus definitions are out of date and it needs to be updated. After the update you want to scan the system hard-drive but be aware the Rescue Disks drive letters may not be in synch with the system depending on the actual order of partitions on the hard-drive.

[fellah]

I usually change the scan options to let me choose at the end of the scan what I want to do with the found items. After the Kaspersky scan the misdirection of search results ceased and hopefully the system was clean. If it is XP, be sure you have a look at the Control Panel, Scheduled Tasks and clean it out if necessary. I hope this will help you to understand you to more about it. If you still confused then go on Google and search about it.

[Caiden]

Check C:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and see if a plain text file called HOSTS exists. There should also be a sample file in the same \etc folder. For any URL entered in that file, your computer will go to the accompanying IP address without using any dns services, so if someone or something has planted a bogus HOSTS file in the computer, your browsers will all go to bogus locations. That used to be a very common hijack, also a way to speed up the internet (no DNS delays for common URLs) and a way to blocks ads (reroute them locally at your own machine so they null out).

[DeMario]

Very true and that's one of the first things I checked, but when I first read the OP's 2nd sentence (Any hyperlink that is clicked on.) my first thought was "then why are you clicking on anything?" It would seem that entering the URL in the window at the top of the page would be the first step in figuring out/fixing the problem. "Nowadays malware prefer hijacking DNS server/resolution" Yeah, wasn't it only last year that six out of the eight top level DNS servers got hacked? Still the net is such a frail construction.