Sir,
My Dell Laptop (Inspiron 15 3521) is infected with a virus/malware/adware. I downloaded a game 2 weeks back from the internet which led to the problem.
Norton 360 did not detect it. I have had no problems for 3 years.
The threat:
- Whenever I open a website, upon clicking anywhere on the page leads to a new tab which starts with ad-type.google.com and then switches to tradeadexchange.com and then to some other website (ilivid, fake facebook site, some mtnl page).
- The next time I click, nothing happens for a while and the website works fine but sometime afterwards the same thing happens again.
- The infection slows down my computer and I see 100% disk usage in the taskmanager
What I have tried to rectify this problem:
- Norton 360 full scan (boot scan option somehow does not get activated - I change it to aggressive but upon restart, nothing happens)
- Norton Power Eraser
- Other adware/malware removers from the internet
- Uninstalling and Reinstalling Chrome and Internet Explorer
- Resetting settings of both browsers
- Deleting extensions and plugins of browsers
- Searching for malicious softwares/processes running in background (did not find any)
- Searching in all kinds of ways in C Drive and also in regedit (found nothing)
- Used Dell Recovery to restore factory defaults (Still the problem exists)
- Formatted C Drive and restored factory defaults from a usb pen drive (Still the problem exists)
- I can't reinstall fresh win8.1 because Dell people did not give me a backup of the original win8.1 installed on my laptop. They did give me a pen drive saying that it contains original win8.1 but today I found that it only has Dell Recovery Software.
Now I am absolutely out of options...
I think that this virus has made its way to the roots - maybe the bios or partition table. I dont think boot is affected because after formatting it should have goten erased.
I dont think my personal D Drive could automatically infect C Drive. Could it?
Please find a cure to this because I am unable to use my Laptop at all. I am scared that it would collect sensitive information like my credit card details if I shop online. And the other problem is that the system has gone so slow that sometimes it hangs and I have to shut it down.
Please find a solution and update norton to fix this problem.
I hope I have given a clear picture of this threat. Help me.
Thank You
- Nitin Arnold Victor