06-14-2010, 03:37 PM

I have had this annoying bug rerouting all pages that I am linked to from Google. The sites that it sends me to are advertisements, sometimes related search pages, or links to yellopages.com. Wellaction.com and googleanalytics often comes up in the status bar. Also, its occuring on Safari and Firefox. Ive used three different anti-virus programs and they have all shown that my macbook is virus free. So I am pretty sure that the bug is in my router. I am planning on resetting it and calling Belkin customer support to walk me through the setup but I want to try to reset Firefox first. My two questions are:

1. What does it mean to reset Firefox? Will I lose all addons and bookmarks?

2. How do I backup my bookmarks, addons and preferences before I make the reset?

06-14-2010, 03:51 PM

It's fairly hard to hack a router remotely..so how do you know that it's a router problem? Can you better explain what you are doing in Firefox/Safari and how the redirect is happening..go step by step..

Regards

06-14-2010, 04:51 PM

Originally Posted by pebaker2

I have had this annoying bug rerouting all pages that I am linked to from Google. The sites that it sends me to are advertisements, sometimes related search pages, or links to yellopages.com. Wellaction.com and googleanalytics often comes up in the status bar. Also, its occuring on Safari and Firefox. Ive used three different anti-virus programs and they have all shown that my macbook is virus free. So I am pretty sure that the bug is in my router. I am planning on resetting it and calling Belkin customer support to walk me through the setup but I want to try to reset Firefox first. My two questions are:

1. What does it mean to reset Firefox? Will I lose all addons and bookmarks?

2. How do I backup my bookmarks, addons and preferences before I make the reset?

1. If you want to reset Firefox, you should NOT lose bookmarks or add-ons. It simply just clears the cache, and resets all the settings back to default. You will lose any personalized settings such as fonts, tab settings etc.

2. Use an add-on called Xmarks to backup all your bookmarks. Xmarks can also backup passwords etc. Preferences for Firefox should be kept in a separate file with all the plist files (for mac) or in the Firefox program folder (on PC). I'm not sure which ones, but Google it. I'm sure you'll find it.

And incase someone is about to post "he/she can't do any of that because their browser is hijacked", might I suggest using a different browser like IE, Opera or Safari.

06-14-2010, 05:23 PM

Sounds like your DNS might be poisoned... wasn't there a malicious script out a while ago that would change DNS settings?

Check under System Preferences > Network > Advanced > DNS and see if there are any entries there that aren't greyed out. If there are, select them all and click "–" to get rid of them.

06-14-2010, 06:57 PM

There sure is - it's a trojan (see here for more info).

To the OP: Have you downloaded and installed anything lately? Have you undertaken any "dubious" activities recently (I'm not here to judge)?

06-17-2010, 11:55 PM

I used OpenDNS for a day or so and then when I got tired of that I went into the router settings and reset it. My router is working fine and so is my browser. Im glad it was an easy (and accidental) fix.