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Can firefox be the source of malicious link redirects if virus checkers come up with nothing?

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I have recently begun getting redirects off of links displayed in google searches to advertising sites. I had never seen this before. I have microsoft essentials loaded and with a full scan shows no malware. I also ran the kapursky rescue disk scan - also no results. I also ran the TDSSKILLER rootkit tool, again with no alerts. Is there any evidence that the firefox browser or plugins can be compromised without detection by ant-virus software? The number of these incidents really seems to point away from corruption of all these destination websites.

I have recently begun getting redirects off of links displayed in google searches to advertising sites. I had never seen this before. I have microsoft essentials loaded and with a full scan shows no malware. I also ran the kapursky rescue disk scan - also no results. I also ran the TDSSKILLER rootkit tool, again with no alerts. Is there any evidence that the firefox browser or plugins can be compromised without detection by ant-virus software? The number of these incidents really seems to point away from corruption of all these destination websites.

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Do a malware check with some malware scanning programs on the Windows computer. You need to scan with all programs because each program detects different malware. Make sure that you update each program to get the latest version of their databases before doing a scan.

*   http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php - Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware
*   http://www.superantispyware.com/ - SuperAntispyware
*   http://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/en-us/default.aspx - Microsoft Safety Scanner

You can also do a check for a rootkit infection with TDSSKiller.

See also:

*   "Spyware on Windows": http://kb.mozillazine.org/Popups_not_blocked 

If using the above listed scanners does not fix it or if you are blocked from installing those scanners then ask advice at a forum that specializes in malware removal.