Hmmm, It's Happening Again

[cinema_babe]

I logged on to Facebook and MySpace came up instead. This happened on both Firefox and MSIE at the same time. This is weird.

Comments

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

What do you mean by "logged on to"?

[cinema-babe.livejournal.com]

I mean "signed on to", work brain was talking I guess.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

So you saw a login screen from Facebook, rather than being semi-permanently logged in and just going to the URL? That was the question I meant.

[cinema-babe.livejournal.com]

In MSIE, Facebook is my home page, when I clicked to refresh, the page that came up is MySpace. I keep FB up on one of my Firefox tabs at all times, when I refreshed that screen the same thing happens.

My virus scan didn't pick up anything and I don't see anything on-line so I'm going to assume that this is a problem with my Internet connection or my computer.

[tactisle.livejournal.com]

A quick Googling of "facebook myspace redirect" yields a lot of people complaining of "facebook.com" sending them to various other places. Myspace, even Google one person mentions. Most of them, though, seem to be getting redirected to spam sites like CreditCardHeaven.

The consensus appears to be that this is a form of malware that changes a computer's DNS hosts file and redirects the browser to a site of its choosing. It's called a "redirect attack," similar to a "man-in-the-middle attack."

If this is what you have, you're lucky: the malware code probably had redirected people from Facebook to a MySpace page that was tricked out to look like Facebook, and would capture the passwords of unsuspecting people. But perhaps MySpace removed the phishing page before you got infected.

You can clear your "hosts" file by using Start -> Run to run the command: ipconfig /flushdns

That should get rid of the immediate redirects, but the malware will probably re-edit the file unless it's removed.

I'd recommend running a virus scan, and then one or two anti-malware scans in addition. I'm pretty sure you already have a few of these, but just in case:

Malwarebytes anti-malware:
http://www.malwarebytes.org/

Spybot Search & Destroy:
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/spybotsd/index.html

Windows Defender: (free download for XP and up, though I think it's included in Vista and Seven)
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/defender/default.mspx

I hope this takes care of it, and that nobody hijacked your passwords. Damn, but malware is proliferating. I know a half-dozen people who've never gotten a computer virus in their lives, some of them are running firewalls and active virus blockers, and they're still getting hit this year. Shirley even had her WoW account hacked the other week, via a keylogger that flew in on some Web 2.0 widget that bypasses the virus-scanner's "Web shield" and behaves like a local network communication. Yeesh.

[cinema-babe.livejournal.com]

Thank you; this is one of the myriad reasons I love you.

It is a pain because I'm pretty good about computer security but I'm having some issues with this and my router password that I'm sure is related to malware/viruses/etc of some kind and I just don't know what to do anymore.

I'm probably going to have to dismantle my network and set it back up again. Grrrr