Help! At loss about Redirection

I work on Mac G5 with OS 10.3.9 and I use firefox as my web-browser. Recently when I try to go on certain sites or click links on some sites, I keep being redirected to http://www.com.org. So I want to know if anyone has had this problem and what you did to solve it.

Is it a virus/spyware on the mac or is it the web-browser? Please help

Do you have any ad-blocking add-ons, plug-ins, extensions, etc, installed on your system? My guess is its that or perhaps your hosts file. Hmmmm... could even be the router (if you are using one).

All the plug-ins and extensions that installed on my system belong to Firefox and this stuff only started happening recently. If it is in the hosts file how do I go about repairing it. As for the router, because of the nature of my work, I'm behind a firewall but that has never been a major problem

Well, the easiest place to put a DNS redirect in would be your HOSTS file (as noted above). So, give that a check. Browse out to /private/etc/ and look for a file called "HOSTS". Open it with TextEdit. If it hasn't been altered, it should look like this:



If there are additional entries in there below the last line, please cut and paste the content of the file back to this thread so we can take a look.

Ok I'm learning mac as i go, so could you give me directions to open the hosts file in textedit?

Well, normally you would just browse out to the directory with Finder and double-click on the file, but since the directory is hidden, I don't know of any easy way to get to it using the Finder. Instead, I would just use the terminal and open it with pico (my preferred text editor).

Open Terminal (Applications => Utilities) and type the following:


...then hit Return and you should see the content of your HOSTS file. Copy and paste the text into a reply in this thread so we can inspect if for you.

Press Control-X to exit pico and then close the Terminal window.

thank you and here is the info:

##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost

Looks clean to me, so that's probably not where the problem stems from.

could this be any of the plugins? i have the same problem, mine redirects me when using firefox and safari, its like this..

ill go search something in google



then this will happen everytime

Having a similar problem, no matter what browser i use (safari,firefox,opera all latest versions) if i try to go to digg.com I get redirected to the dreaded
xpsecuritycenter. Tried downloading avast but found nothing. Found Hosts files looks like this.
GNU nano 2.0.1 File: /private/etc/hosts

##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost
fe80::1%lo0 localhost









[ Read 10 lines ]
^G Get Help ^O WriteOut ^R Read File ^Y Prev Page ^K Cut Text ^C Cur Pos
^X Exit ^J Justify ^W Where Is ^V Next Page ^U UnCut Text^T To Spell


Any ideas??

Remove it from /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/plugins.settings- see http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/trojan_osx_dnschanger.shtml. I would also adjust the crontab as root.

Or, better yet, run this:

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/33696

Avoid the websites that prompted you to download the false codec (which is what caused this).