Things had started going downhill fast. By this point my laptop was blue screening every 10 minutes. It couldn’t run a single application, let alone anti-virus software, without shitting the bed. Sometimes it would just reboot to a dead screen requiring a hard restart. What started as a simple triplexfeed.com search redirect had quickly rendered my laptop into a smoldering, useless heap.

I’m not some reckless surfer. This is a work machine – a soulless hunk of black plastic I can’t wait to leave behind for the friendly embrace of my iMac at home. No questionable sites, no peer-to-peer, no two girls and a cup.

Maybe it was a twitter link. All those shortened URLs can disguise a host of sins. I’ve become a tad promiscuous in my Twitter follows and now serve as the horrible warning of why IT doesn’t want you to have Admin privileges on your PC.

It starts out with search. The results look reasonable. A query on BHP Billiton buying Athabasca Potash turns up the usual batch of innocuous looking links, but click on any one of them and suddenly the browser gets hijacked and reroutes to a triplexfeed.com domain and then jumps to some spammy link page. I never realized how much I rely on Google in the course of a day.

IE 8, Firefox, Google, Bing it didn’t matter. And so the usual suspects are trotted out. Adaware and Spybot find the usual cookies but nothing too serious and the problem still remains. Trend Micro’s Housecall at least turned up rootkits that it confidently claimed to have dealt with, but a fresh scan would turn up the same 2-3 rootkits. Time to start deleting files. Firefox add-ons purged. Nothing. Ditch the browsers entirely and start again. No luck. I start purging entire applications and the virus takes it up a notch.

So while my PC starts gasping its last, some digging online tells me I’ve encountered an especially nasty TDL3 rootkit oft referred to as the Google Redirect Infection. Turns out SurfRight in the Netherlands knows all about it and its Hitman Pro 3 – the “world’s first cloud-computing, anti-malware” application is one of the only apps that sufficiently deals with the issue. (If I were a less than charitable sort I’d suspect they’d written the virus in the first place.) While every other process on the PC at this point results in a blue screen of death, Hitman Pro loaded up, successfully ran and isolated a dozen undetected nasties. Thankfully there’s a free 30 day trial that purged the rootkits and seems to have resolved all my issues.

I’m sifting through the rubble now but I’m cautiously optimistic. Processes seem back to normal for the time being and I’ve yet to blue screen. The twitterverse has started experiencing this so I thought it best to throw it all into a post. Hope it helps.