How to deal with rogue diverter www.bywill.net in Google.
When desired site is clicked in Google www.bywill.net appears in the destination window instead of the site address listed and a different site is displayed. This happens with IE as well as Firefox. Repeated searches by McAfee disclose no viruses. They suggested site blocking but this only stops bywell displaying its chosen site.
Chosen solution
by XircalHi Geoff, please do the following.
Download the free version of Malwarebytes from http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free and run a full system scan to eliminate malware as the culprit as is often the case.
Next:
- Go to about:config again and then in the filter at the top, type: bywell
- For every entry which appears with that name in it, right click it and choose "Reset".
- Close Firefox and then restart it again to complete the removal.
If all else fails...
- Click "Help" | "Restart with add-ons disabled".
- Checkmark "Reset all user preferences to Firefox defaults"
- Click "Make Changes and restart".
This will remove all your customizations and add-ons and restore Firefox to a virgin state.
Read this answer in context 7Helpful replies
To revert to Google as your preferred search engine, please do the following.
- In the location bar, type about:config and hit Enter.
- In the filter at the top, type: keyword.URL
- Double click it and remove whatever's in there and replace it with http://www.google.com/search?q=
The URL to add in "keyword.URL" becomes a link in this post, so right click it and choose "Copy Link Location" to copy it to the Windows clipboard. Then hit CTRL+V to paste it. Saves you having to type the whole thing.
To reset your home page, do the following.
- Go to the site you want to set as your homepage.
- Click the orange Firefox button and go to Options | Options | General (Firefox 4.0.x and above).
- Go to Tools | Options | General (Previous version of Firefox).
- Make sure it says "Show My Homepage" in the first dropdown menu.
- Click the button called "Use Current Pages" to set the homepage to the one you have on the screen.
After you complete the above steps, install this add-on to prevent another search engine from modifying your preferences: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/browserprotect/
If the problem persists, then you probably have the Google Redirect Virus on your system. In that particular case, follow instructions here to remove it: http://deletemalware.blogspot.com/2010/02/remove-google-redirect-virus.html
Go to answer 10I use https://encrypted.google.com/
No hijacker, so far, has taken my google search off of the search engine preference.
Go to answer 3Additional System Details
Sites Affected
http://www.bywill.net
Installed Plug-ins
- Picasa plugin
- Next Generation Java Plug-in 1.6.0_24 for Mozilla browsers
- NPRuntime Script Plug-in Library for Java(TM) Deploy
- McAfee MSC FF plugin DLL
- McAfee Virtual Technician plugin for Mozilla (Gecko Version: 1.8b1)
- 4.0.60310.0
- Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) plug-in for Mozilla browsers
- Adobe PDF Plug-In For Firefox and Netscape "9.4.4"
- Npdsplay dll
- DRM Store Netscape Plugin
- DRM Netscape Network Object
Application
- User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1
More Information
Question owner
Thank you for your tip but someone with the necessary power and authority seems to have put paid to bywill's shenanigans.