Behind the Blogger: A Malware Infestation at Greenlee Gazette

I'm a computer guru. I'm not professionally trained, but I'm naturally inclined toward tweaking and poking around in computer settings and whatnot. I'm "that guy" you call when your computer is doing weird things or is on the fritz. 99% of the time, I can either fix it, or tell you what to do to fix it. I've been using Windows computers since they were MS-DOS computers. But what does the guru do when he's got a problem?

Every so often, even I get a problem. I can get complacent, trust something I ought not, accidentally clicked the wrong thing, or even have gotten suckered by a warning that looked real, but wasn't. Usually, I realize my error quickly, and reverse course. I know a lot of the tricks of the trade to restore things to normal without too much fuss.

Two things have plagued me that have no known source of infection, and one even happened both at home and at work. That first one was a very strange audio anomaly. Commercials would play over the speakers with no program running them. They would be both in English and in foreign languages, and they would eventually pile one on top of the other until it was an unintelligible cacophony. I could isolate the audio on my mixer settings and silence them, but eventually all of the processing power would be leached away. It was maddening. But, after running the proper tools (Malwarebytes), using the Googles to isolate the proper files in the registry, and slogging through the guts of the computer, I killed the problem. And again at home.

I still don't know what it was, or how I got it. And to be truthful, I'm not sure what the final thing was that worked. Funny how that goes, you try so many things, you can't remember the sequence. Anyway, though I slayed that beast, there is a new one plaguing me the last two days.

First, I should explain that I run dual monitors, and I am usually running Internet Explorer 11, Firefox and AOL at the same time (AOL?!? Yeah, I know. Shut up, it's how I work, okay?). And this new demon affects both AOL--and get this--FIREFOX. Not IE. It's working just fine. No, this one is throwing up random ads from Firefox and AOL, for both bogus and real products. Sometimes it's TuneUp Utilities, a program that used to be very helpful but bloomed into a nuisance, sometimes it's WIX.com. Other times it's for very shady programs that cause the very thing I'm trying to get rid of. And sometimes, it's bogus upgrade notices for video players I don't even have, to the point of attempting to start downloads of the programs.

It's driving me bananas. I've gone through my bag of tricks. I'm using Windows 8.1, so I've got Windows Defender already. I've run Malwarebytes several times. I installed and ran Avast! I've tried SUPERAntiSpyware. All of these programs found problems and allegedly cleaned them. And the problem remains exactly the same. No change. Presently, I'm going into my old bag of tricks, a program called SpyBot Search & Destroy, something I haven't used for years. But I'm desperate! I'm really not sure what to try next. At present, this problem doesn't seem particularly dangerous, it's just incredibly annoying.

So, I'm sending this out to the universe, in the hopes someone stumbles upon it via Google or Bing. Any help will be appreciated. And also, could someone please tell me what purpose this crap serves in the first place? It's garbagy, clunky, obviously crap stuff popping up. I can't imagine it fooling a neophyte. A lot of work must go into this kind of malware. But how in the world is it worth it? If their aim is simply to torment and annoy, then mission accomplished. But if the aim is leaching money from people, they really must be trolling for dummies. Because if I wasn't a guru? I'd throw my hands up and call "that guy" to just come fix it.

UPDATED: I should also say that whatever is going on, in both AOL and Firefox, ordinary ads that appear on websites have been replaced with really ugly, very cheesy "your computer is running slow," "Microsoft certified"-type ads with blinking "click here" and "PLAY"-type buttons. We're talking 90s-style, wouldn't-fool-an-idiot ads. These are very annoying also.