Virus!

I got infected a couple of days ago. Minor, but annoying. There was a download I REALLY wanted on Pirate Bay so I decided to try getting it. But first I needed a downloader program. I Googled the subject and found a promising one which I installed. The problem was, it brought a bunch of unwanted programs with it that I did not want!

One of these programs was a search engine / toolbar called mysearchdial that installed itself in Chrome and Firefox (probably in IE as well but I never open IE). The search engine presents itself as an extra tab every time the program opens. I tried uninstalling it using all the normal methods but none of them worked.

I have all three of my computers hooked up to share settings and bookmarks through Google so the infection  instantly spread to all three computers! I Googled "mysearchdial" and found one program (adwcleaner) that was recommended to remove it. I downloaded and ran adwcleaner and it worked. The problem was that as soon as I re-opened Chrome, it reinstalled itself from one of the other computers using the share settings link.

I turned Google share off on all three computers and ran the removal program on all three. It worked! The only problem was that all my custom Chrome settings were gone as well. Oh well, it will serve to teach me a lesson.