Recently I did a scan on my dads computer just for the usual “house keeping” with avast and Kaspersky online scanner avast! didnt detect anything but Kaspersky did it detected the adware MyWebSearch in ASKPBAR.DLL now what was unusual about this is that It detected it before and it seems to be affiliated with the Ask search bar on Internet Explorer (which we dont use) so I uploaded the file to Virustotal and sure enough 12 scanners picked it up as MyWebSearch but whats even more odd about it to me is that I also uploaded the file to Avasts online file scanner and it came up clean when I have uploaded a file before belonging to MyWebSearch and Avast! has always detected it unless this is a new version not seen yet so on that note I sent the file to avast for analysis and I just posted this because I would like to read some more professional views on this subject
There is a line of thought that it is adware as it gathers information on your searches for marketing purposes, so it is hard to say if this is considered evil.
Interestingly there is another topic today which detects mywebsearch assistant. My advice would be to uninstall the mywebsearch from IE. If you can’t find how to do that, HiJackThis will dig it out so you can fix the entry and delete the file if it remains.
Thank you DavidR I was thinking about doing that after studying it for a bit? I already know how it got installed through a program my dad uses ill have to alert him to it
No problem, the my way search assistant whilst it gather information on search strings, I don’t think that information is uniquely linked to your dad or his system, but it would probably be used to serve ads that are relevant to the searches made, assuming he used IE.
The main issue as far as I’m concerned is the fact you aren’t made aware of what it does and for me that is the reason I would get rid of it.