MN keeps on disappearing for me! Heeelp

[Longtallsally]

Agh! Whilst reading MN my browser keeps on changing to a Sony search page which say it cannot find a specific facebook page. I haven?t asked it to! It does this every 5 seconds ? there?s obviously a command somewhere in the system telling it to look for this page, but I am not aware of it.

Any ideas how to stop it doing this? It only seems to happen when I am on MN!

We'll need some more information first...

What Operating System (e.g. Windows 7, Windows Vista, Mac OS X Lion etc.) and Browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari etc.) are you using?

If you're on a Windows PC are your anti virus and Malware protection both up to date.

If you've not got a Malware Scanner then the free version of Malwarebytes is very good, download it from here:
www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free

Thanks ? Virus protection up to date but don?t think we have Malware so am installing now.

We are Windows 7, I think, and I use Internet Explorer . . . .

Weird that it only affects MN ? though no doubt dh will be delighted!

Thanks Badger. Malware has found and isolated Something Nasty for me.

How come we need anti virus and Malware then?

There's a fine line between the two... Viruses are malware, but malware need not be a virus.

Traditionally viruses are things that can spread themselves without any interaction from a user. So you visit a bad web site or open an infected attachment and then your machine is infected with the virus.

But there's another stream of malware where people have chosen to install it. So someone might believe that their installing a tool to play a particular type of video but what they actually get is a piece of software that tracks what they're up to.

So anti-malware software can just be looking on your machine for software that it knows as being bad even if you have chosen to go ahead and put it on your machine.

Where as anti-virus software will often just be looking and stopping things from happening that you don't know are happening.

But it is a blurry differentiation. Some "anti-virus" packages will also scan for malware that isn't strictly a virus, but in my opinion on a Windows computer it's well worth double checking and having a stand alone anti-malware checker too.

Oh and did it fix the problem?

It did, thank you sorry dh!