StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I'm having a Google problem (no, Pelranius has not become a neologism, at least not since the last time I checked).

The result links from Google search don't quite work (I get diverted onto weird sites) so I have to copy and past the URL to get to anything I search. This applies to all the web browsers I've used. Bing doesn't seem to be having this problem.

Searching through the News always ends up in the general search engine, I have to click the news tab on the left to get News only results (funnily, the links work just fine there, at least so far).

The worst part is Google email. I can't access it because the web browser (Firefox, Chrome, IE) always tells me that the server is timed out. Though I can access it from my email.

Is anyone else having problems with their Google services like that too?

I've seen that in the past as a result of a virus/spyware. If you can do scans with anti-virus/malware software and see if that fixes the issue.

Tried that this morning. Didn't seem to take. Will try again.

Open your 'hosts' file (in C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\, it has no file extension) with Notepad. Unless you've added entries yourself, its only contents should be those in the examples in this Knowledge Base article. If there's anything else that you didn't add yourself, delete those lines and save the file.

Run MalwareBytes and Avast, because you definitely have badness on that system.

Definiely check the hosts file as I mentioned above, too. I don't know about Avast, but MalwareBytes, MSE and AVG don't pick up on modified hosts files, probably because of the legitimate reasons for adding entries to it. Every time we've had a PC with Google/Bing redirect malware come in, I've always had to fix the hosts file post-cleaning because the redirect issue was still there.