My Firefox hijacked

[mongo2]

This AM I started my PC with the On/Off button on the chassis.

It took forever to load.  Several minutes.

 

Last night it would not turn off.  First I tried to put it in sleep mode by clicking the icon within the Windows icon.  It would go into sleep mode as directed, but seconds later would reboot and turn on again.  I tried that several times and it happened again each time.

 

Then I tried to shut down the PC using the same method.  It would restart every time.  I tried this several times too, being care I was clicking in the correct place.  Still a restart.

 

The, finally I turned it off by holding in the On/Off button for a long time.

 

That was last night.

 

- - -

 

This morning I pushed the On/Off button to start it.  As mentioned above it took a loooong time to boot.  When it finally did I clicked on the Firefox icon in the Task Bar as I always do to access the internet.

 

Instead of Firefox a different browser came up. 

It was called fidonav.com.

This invaded browser gave me several Google icons to choose from to open.  I certainly did not want to open anything I had not installed myself, so I entered the browser name into the Search box (upper right).

 

That listed several references to this invasion browser.  One was from Firefox Support.  I clicked on that one and the Firefox Support page came up and listed a fix.  Followed the instructions carefully and it fixed the problem in seconds.

 

So, now back to normal it seems.

 

Am sending this as a heads up in case any of you get the same problem.

 

I should add that I had run an antivirus program (Ariva free antivirus) the last thing I did before trying to shut down last night.

It had found one detection (the name I do not recall) and I quarantined it.

 

[CyberPro]

In addition to the AV scan you did, I'd download and scan using the free version of Malwarebytes. 

You also might want to consider a paid version of AV such as Webroot which will warn you when you are about to visit a suspicious web site as well as blocking malware such as encryption ransomware.

I also did a web search for fidonav. Below may be the Firefox support page you mention. 

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1170920 

[Kahoy]

You should use Window to shut down your computer and not the hardware switch. This gives the operating system time to do some processing such as saving state, etc and closing open and locked files.

[Kahoy]

Fidonav is malware. Get Malware bytes free version and run a weekly manual scan or whenever you see something unusual.

[just hanging]

if a suspect page comes up with links, like firefox, get outa there and find firefox fix by yourself.  clicking on a link, no matter what it looks like or  says can embed the virus deep

[mongo2]

2 hours ago, kahoy said:

You should use Window to shut down your computer and not the hardware switch. This gives the operating system time to do some processing such as saving state, etc and closing open and locked files.

Kahoy,

I appreciate your suggestion BUT I repeatedly tried to go into SleepMode then repeatedly tried to go to Shut Down mode using the Window icon in the task bar ( lower right corner) .  Every time the PC would restart.  That is the only reason I forced it off. 

[Kahoy]

4 minutes ago, mongo2 said:

Kahoy,

I appreciate your suggestion BUT I repeatedly tried to go into SleepMode then repeatedly tried to go to Shut Down mode using the Window icon in the task bar ( lower right corner) .  Every time the PC would restart.  That is the only reason I forced it off. 

Unless you really need software that runs only on Windows, consider installing ubuntu instead. Firefox and Chrome work fine in ubuntu and there is a free and compatible version of Office. All upgrades are free and no risk of viruses or malware. 

[mongo2]

1 hour ago, just hanging said:

if a suspect page comes up with links, like firefox, get outa there and find firefox fix by yourself.  clicking on a link, no matter what it looks like or  says can embed the virus deep

just hanging, I appreciate your suggestion too.  In this case, when the Fidonav.com page was up there was no way to access Firefox from the page.  In the URL entry line the findonav.com URL was entered.  I deleted that with the backspace key, then entered firefox.con.  The Fidonav.com site came back up.

Then I entered Firefox support into the Search box (upper right) and a list of Firefox support sites came up.  One of those was entitled "Support Forum"" with a question posted with it.  The question was Ïn a recent updáte, my firefox now goes to 'fidonav.com'. I do not want this.  I want Firefox back, and I've got Google all over the place.  How do I ge Firefox back?

I clicked on that to get the instructions which worked for me.

 

 

[mongo2]

6 minutes ago, kahoy said:

Unless you really need software that runs only on Windows, consider installing ubuntu instead. Firefox and Chrome work fine in ubuntu and there is a free and compatible version of Office. All upgrades are free and no risk of viruses or malware. 

Thanks, I may try that next time.  In the meantime I am running Windows 10 Pro and have only little bits of issues now and then.