You guys ever heard of a link hijacker on Safari? A friend reports having weird problems with her Mac (difficult to interpret
exactly as she doesn't read dialogue boxes and doesn't use any kind of standard nomenclature to describe windows, icons, buttons, etc.
) where she says she searches on google and when she clicks any of the links they take her to spam type junkware sites instead of where she wanted to go. So, she cuts and pastes URLs from the google page into the address bar.
I haven't heard of anything like that on a mac...I'm guessing she's been hijacked somehow. Any ideas?
I know short on details, but that's about as much as I've got at the moment to go on.
I think there may be such malware around now, although I understand it is not common.
First she should open Safari and select Reset Safari from the Safari menu. There may be a bad cookie in there and it could probably do with a clean out of caches, history and favicons anyway.
She will lose any saved usernames and passwords though
There is an open source antivirus software for Mac OS X 10.4 and later called ClamXav
http://www.clamxav.com/It would be worth running this - just in case. It will find any Windows viruses too
And there is MacScan. It is $30 and it picks up trojans, keyloggers and tracking cookies
http://macscan.securemac.com/If the first two things don't work, MacScan might. I wouldn't guarantee it though.
I have some experience with Norton Antivirus on both Mac and Windows and I would not use it again if I were paid to. It is very intrusive and can slow down and cripple your computer. It would not uninstall properly from my Mac when I last tried it 2 years ago and I wound up reformatting the hard drive to get rid of it. I am forced to use Sophos Antivirus for the Mac at work. It successfully found some old worms that I left for it and seems slow but harmless.
Colin
