Adware

markyboy.1967 · 1 Jul 2013

The wifes new laptop had an issue where she gets all sorts of unwanted ad when she goes to websites like Facebook--i ran a scan and McAfee total protection on the pc says it has blocked adware.I have since got McSfee to remove it but when she goes to FB she is always getting ads when she clicks on pics that people have put up--some of them are not ones you want your young family to see..

Any ideas how these can be removed.

neil_g · 1 Jul 2013

Uninstall mcafee first off.

Pop avast on and do a boot scan (scans before windows boots), my oh laptop had an exploit that was only detected then.

Pinkbikerbabe · 1 Jul 2013

My adivice would be to try a rootkit scan as sometimes theses type of things can hide deep in the registry and can be a pain to remove. If you have the file location of where said offending item is then you can also go into the file location and manually delete the item. If it still happens then maybe doing a restore on your wifes laptop.

kendo1 · 1 Jul 2013

Yep, uninstall McAfee.
AVG is free, and you can have the full version free for a month. Just revert to the free version at the end. I have the free version and have had no problems for the last two years.

Superantispyware is also free, useful for scans but not as an anti-virus. It can root out problems that some anti-virus can't.

neil_g · 1 Jul 2013

kendo1 said:
Yep, uninstall McAfee.
AVG is free, and you can have the full version free for a month. Just revert to the free version at the end. I have the free version and have had no problems for the last two years.

Superantispyware is also free, useful for scans but not as an anti-virus. It can root out problems that some anti-virus can't.

Avg has unfortunately become pretty bloated of late, and avast found nasties on a system that had avg on

markyboy.1967 · 1 Jul 2013

Thanks folks, i will have a look first to see where its hidden away and try to delete manually, if not ten i will try Avast.Cheers..

Pookeyhead · 2 Jul 2013

I'd just nuke the hard drive clean with a format, and start again. I'm assuming you have everything backed up of course. If not, why not?

MS Security Essentials is actually very good... and free.

Lyonspride · 2 Jul 2013

Get rid of whatever nonsense is going on, then install Firefox and the Adblock+ addon.

SimonUK · 2 Jul 2013

If you cant nuke the hard drive( which I would suggest)

Take off your network completely, and run Microsoft Security Essentials. Let that do its thing. Then a Rootkit scan.

Back everything up as you can onto a clean USB hard drive and scan that as well.

If you don't have everything backed up, i'd suggest that you start and wipe the drive, that means when it happens next time its just a case of re-installing windows and bring everything back over. A few hours max.

Lyonspride · 3 Jul 2013

markyboy.1967 said:
but when she goes to FB she is always getting ads when she clicks on pics that people have put up--some of them are not ones you want your young family to see..

Are you sure these aren't just pics put up by people with infected machines/accounts?

Thing with Facebook is most people will click on any old **** if they think a friend posted it, the link adds itself to your "likes" and then reposts itself to all your contacts, they then click and the whole process goes round and round and round until somebody says "FOR **** SAKE, YOU BUNCH OF IDIOTS STOP CLICKING THESE LINKS!!!!".

And in addition, you cannot win an Ipad or a 55inch TV (the latest from a fake PC world page) by likeing/sharing a page and sharing/liking a page will not make Facebook donate money to a sick child, who's photo was stolen from the poor mothers Facebook, website or blog and she now has to see her dead childs face being used to scam people on social media websites.

All this ^^ is about collecting likes so that scammers can sell these pages to advertising companies, who then bombard you with even more ****.

Break the chain, stop and think before you click.