I never ever ever write tech diaries even though I like computers, am an online addict, and sometimes even read some lay-person type tech articles. But I have no real expertise to offer anyone other than my tech-challenged family members.
However, I had to see if others have had this experience.
I have used Firefox almost exclusively for a number of years (6 or 7?), love it, am comfortable with it, and have only run into a few problems with some recent updates. I also have IE on my computer and Chrome on my Windows Vista PC, just for backup.
A few days ago I downloaded a game for a free trial. My Norton said it was a safe site. I executed the download, was presented with a menu with prechecked boxes for installing various elements of something called "Babylon." I unchecked all the boxes, made sure everything was set up to not install anything, and went ahead with getting my game.
Then I got back onto Firefox. My search engine, my home page and I think a toolbar had been changed to all things Babylon. I could change them back, but couldn't get rid of them -- everytime I restarted Firefox, there the little buggers were, grinning at me.
I uninstalled the parent software of my game (and maybe a Babylon entry -- I can't remember for sure). Didn't help. Did a search of my computer for Babylon, eliminated anything I found. Didn't help.
I went online and found various fixes -- removed all traces of Babylon from about:configure. Still came back. Someone else had gotten a link from Babylon which they claimed helped but the link had been closed down -- my guess is that it was a plant by Babylon to make sure you didn't get rid of it. (there was also a Babylon sponsored video on Youtube about removing it -- but the video was removed by its creator!).
Then the next shoe dropped -- my husband, who is a technophobe who hates change went on his IE (all he'll use) and lo and behold, it wouldn't even load because it was weighed down with Babylon stuff (finally did load but it was messed up!).
So I went back to my infected Firefox and looked up (after shifting my search engine back to google) Babylon fixes on IE. There was a good video by a guy named Jose who said that Babylon routinely rides in on a game download on Firefox and then spreads to your other browsers (why had I never heard of this problem before??). Someone else said to get rid of it on IE, launch regedit on Windows, follow a somewhat complicated directory path to Internet Explorer backslash AboutURLS, click on Tabs and change the entry to whatever I wanted -- sure enough, Babylon was in there and I changed the path back to Google. That temporarily fixed IE.
I tried uninstalling Firefox, keeping my personal settings (maybe a mistake, but I didn't want to lose my bookmarks). Reinstalled it, and there was Babylon again in all its ugly glory.
Meanwhile, between the steps I've described, I had scanned my whole hard drive with Malware Bytes (which got rid of a couple of things but I'm not exactly sure they were related), and my Norton Virus scanner which never picked up on Babylon.
Luckily, I had copied my Firefox bookmarks into Chrome several weeks ago, so even though it didn't have my newest ones, my list on Chrome was pretty complete. So I uninstalled ALL of Firefox.
After that I still had to clean Babylon off Chrome and IE (again!). And so far they have remained free of this nasty affliction.
I'm left with trying to understand what this Babylon is -- I assume it's a form of malware, but it's not picked up by the malware detectors even though it's been around for a while -- some entries from people fighting it online were from many months ago. It seems to infect computers sort of like a virus (or a worm? since it doesn't destroy anything). It's not hacker driven -- there's a commercial website associated with it. But I wonder, since there's a site, how can they legally take over parts of our computers the way they do? And what do they expect to gain from this -- I wouldn't use any product of theirs if I were put in front of a firing squad. But maybe people like my husband who are completely unsavvy about computer stuff just go along and use it because they don't notice the difference (but since it just about crashed IE, that doesn't make sense either).
Firefox is gone from my life because I won't risk having it bring Babylon back to my computer and reinfect IE and Chrome, and there are things I truly miss about it. I also uninstalled Safari from my PC so I wouldn't have to deal with cleaning it (I never use it on my PC and only have it because of iTunes -- and I didn't check to see if it got infected).
Any thoughts from the techies here or sympathy from more mid-ranging tech users would be greatly appreciated.