Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Firefox Frustrations

I'm feeling ready to rip my hair out after 2 days of trying to figure out what's wrong with my computer to no avail. When I woke up yesterday, I opened up Firefox (my usual browser) and noticed something was wrong. The Google logo had been replaced with this:

Weird Logo in Google


WTF? Right? I'm immediately panicked because if something has changed a basic home page like Google, what else is vulnerable on my computer? Are all of my keystrokes being redirected somewhere? Scary!

I loaded the logo on a separate page to view the source and it appears (in Firefox) to be coming from google.com. I opened up Internet Explorer and pasted the same address (http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif) and it looks like the normal Google logo. No blue tiger or cat or whatever that thing is.

I spent the day running a throrough virus scan on all of my files. I checked my hosts file. I did another bootscan overnight. I did the Firefox upgrade that came out last night. Still got the blue tiger.

I feel like I'm going crazy! I really need to get work done, but I'm scared to open up anything important on my computer. Even this is being typed in Internet Explorer instead of Firefox (and it took me ages of flipping through notebooks to figure out what my password was to log into my blog). So frustrated!

I've posted in the Google and Firefox forums. Not sure where else to ask for help with this. If anyone has ever heard of this, I'd love to hear from you.

Labels: ,

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

posted by Kris Madison at 6:25 PM

2 Comments:

  • I'd be worried too! I can't find anything on it. Looks like a cougar or a panther to me BTW. Rootkit might be in an eastern european or asian language so maybe that's why I'm having no luck.

    Could just be a glitch though.

    Always best to save a drive image by mounting the HDD read-only via another OS entirely. Later when experimenting monitor the network traffic too. But that's in an ideal world.

    That aside: reset the Firefox cache and see if that clears the logo. If not then check proxy settings. Check for DNS queries on the network and compare with IE ones.

    Very interesting! Good luck. Keep us informed via twitter.

    Regards,

    DaSuthNa.

    By Blogger Da, at 3:16 AM  

  • Hi Kris, don't panic about the google logo. There are several Firefox plugins that allow you to customize the google logo, Greasemonkey is one of them. You have probably installed one or the other of these FF extensions, and hit a shortcut key or something that set that image of the cat/wolf/(fox?) as the google logo. It's extremely unlikely that it is a virus.

    Search for "custom google logo" on google - there's a bunch of different micro-apps that do this. :-)

    Love, Paul

    By Anonymous Paul, at 11:37 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home