A Magical Cure and a Vicious (But Stupid) Virus Identified!
In recent days my computer became totally useless on the Internet, with certain sites becoming inaccessible and irrational popups showing up continually. Thus, the following was tried, and it worked!
In Windows 7:
Accessories … System Tools … System Restore.
A date was selected, and the process was activated. My system was brought back to the condition present on the selected date.
Congrats!!! [:D]
A little searching turns up a wealth of information on Dealster. It is classified as ‘adware’ but with the likelihood of bringing in much more destructive malware. Here are a few links regarding removal and prevention:
http://www.virusresearch.org/remove-dealster-ads-permanent-removal/
http://www.im-infected.com/adware/remove-dealster-virus-removal-guide.html
http://malware-detective.com/uninstall-dealster/
Time to double … er, triple check your browser settings to deflect this junk. Apparently these sleazeballs consider themselves a legitimate business:
http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/dealster
@vsmith, I’m also not happy with the forum changes but, knock wood, it seems to be getting slightly more stable as time goes on. Try as I might, I can’t duplicate your symptoms. In fact, the Reply window font size went from ‘tiny’ a few weeks ago to ‘almost-too-big-KPH’ [(-D] recently.
ANOTHER THOUGHT:
I haven’t ever seen non-Kalmbach ad pop-ups on this site, so perhaps the default features of Firefox are suppressing them. Interestingly, the forum pages have a right hand column below the ‘free email newsletter’ block that looks tailor made for adverts - I just see greyed out blocks. Is anyone seeing content there?
I have had no problems. I have three different firewalls, an anti spam, two anti intrusion programs plus I use Clam Anit Virus to check all files that I download. I protect my system as well as I can… While no system is totally protected the more protection you provide on yoursystem the less chance of you have being infected by a virus.,
Being one of the most computer illiterate person on here and one who doesn’t post pictures, I did come across something by accident.
When going to the reply page, like others, the insert and tools button is missing. I’ve found that with ActiveX filtering enabled by use of the tools function (on the upper left between “favorites” and “Help” on my tool bar) when I change the status of ActiveX using the icon found on the address line, either turning it on or off, it refreshes the page and the insert and tools buttons appear.
If I leave the reply page, without posting, and later return, the buttons are again gone until I change the ActiveX status and it refreshes the page. It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s being turned on or off, just the change in status seems to do it.
Jeff
Careful there Jeff, you keep doing things like that and people will start to rely on you for computer help, because you will have become computer literate!
Dealster is just adware browser extension - those can be usually removed with Avast Browser Cleanup. Here are also complete instructions: