I was pulling up my channel on YouTube this morning to check the stats, when Internet Explorer loaded one of these false search engine pages called MyFreeze. I was pretty ticked, my immediate assumption was that one of the Trojan virus downloaders I was fighting off the other day while investigating eBook copyright infringements had broken through my firewall and virus software. It’s always dicey business to go after infringements on file sharing sites because you have to download files, which gives the malware a chance to enter. But neither my AVG nor MalwareBytes picked up on the MyFreeze as harmful software, so I checked the Internet Explorer setting under Tools>Options>Programs, and sure enough, it showed up when I clicked the “Manage Add-Ons” button.
It wasn’t listed directly as MyFreeze, but as NetAssistant, and it had been installed such that it hijacked 404 errors. A 404 error is a page not found error, and I just happened to get one after mistyping my channel name on YouTube. It’s possible that it was intended to operate as a full-time browser hijack, but that other settings prevent my default home page from being changed without explicit permission. In any case, I assume that I got stuck with this MalWare just yesterday, because I would have noticed otherwise, and after disabling it through “Manage Add Ons”, I also used System Restore to simply set my registry back to last week, after which NetAssistant no longer showed up in the Add-Ons list.
Because nether AVG nor MalwareBytes turned anything else up, my guess is that this version of MyFreeze was a straightforward hijack with no Trojan or other malware components that would trigger users to seek help in removing it. I’ll run a full AVG scan after posting this as a backup, but I don’t plan to run around changing all of my passwords.
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