When I click on “Tools” (in tool bar), then on “Internet Options” I receive a- “Restriction Warning-This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect for this computer.Please contact your system administrator” This would appear to be a malware/virus attack. Has anyone seen or heard of this occurring and it’s cause? I did contact HP to see if they could tell me how to check who/what has assigned itself administrator privileges besides me? I have pasted the message from a screenshot. Thanks for any ideas. Dan
Seems clicking the image button (above) and pasting here doesn’t work…
It doesn’t sound like any malware I’ve heard of as normally when there is something like that it is trying to trick you into an action, visit a site, etc. that would actually infect you.
You have to attach images you can’t paste then, they have to have been saved as an image on your system (small file size preferably) and that attached, see below and image. Clicking the image tag only inserts the tag in which case the file would need to be stored on-line and you paste the location in between the tags. The info below is much easier.
When you click the Reply button, there is an Additional Options link, this expands the options to attach a file, that can be an image file or a text file (.log or .txt).
Hello, I should have mentioned that I can still access the Internet Options via Control Panel, but blocked when access on the toolbar. This has never occurred before. It just seemed that something has caused me to loss privileges to an unknown. I did find this in Admin. Tools/Local Users:(excluding the ones I recognized)
SUPPORT_388945a0 CN=Microsoft Corporation,L=Redmond,S=Washington,C=US This is a vendor’s account for the Help and Support Service
SUPPORT_fddfa904 CN=Hewlett-Packard,L=Cupertino,S=Ca,C=US This is a vendor’s account for the Help and Support Service
The pop-up is this: (I did attach the jpeg, hopefully it is present.) I am checking malware/spyware programs I have to see if they might be involved in locking out certain functions.
It certainly doesn’t look like anything I have seen before, either legit message or spoof/malicious message. I presume that you were logged on to an account with administrator privileges ?
What is your OS and browser ?
If you are logged on to an account with administrator privileges then Control Panel, User Accounts should show all user accounts. On my system I have My account with admin privileges as Guest account and one for ASP.net (limited account) normally placed there if you have .net framework installed.
So the two you mention seem to be to allow remote help by MS and HP, which in an OEM/Retail manufacturers system isn’t unusual, but those accounts would only be active when a remote help session was in progress and then they could change settings.
You haven’t lost privileges to an unknown, that is just the lack of information in the message. I avoid IE like the plague and if it weren’t an integral part of the system it wouldn’t be on my system at all. I still have IE6, was just about to consider IE7 as I though it had been out long enough to fix the kinks and along comes IE*, so now it is a waiting game again.
Why did you want to access the internet options ?
You could try Firefox or Opera which obviously wouldn’t suffer this problem.
If you haven’t already got this software (freeware), download, install, update and run it, preferably in safe mode and report the findings (it should product a log file).
SUPERantispyware On-Demand only in free version. - 2. MalwareBytes Anti-Malware, On-Demand only in free version http://download.bleepingcomputer.com/malwarebytes/mbam-setup.exe, right click on the link and select Save As or Save File (As depending on your browser), save it to a location where you can find it easily later.
Had I not known any better, this looks like a group policy is preventing access to whatever you’re trying to open.
I doubt that you did this yourself, or your computer is part of a domain, so it must be some malware that’s doing it.
Follow DavidR’s instructions and download superantispyware and malwarebytes and do scans with them.
As for finding out what users on your computer have admin rights, it’s as easy as opening your control panel and double-clicking on the “User Accounts” icon/applet.
Thanks for your help- I found what caused this event- Not long ago, the anti spyware/malware program “Spybot Search and Destroy” added to their IE Tweaks (in tools) 3 different lock functions. Ticking a box to increase security for the Control Panel, Hosts or Homepage doesn’t do anything at the time. The computer has to be rebooted to take effect. Once it does, at some point later the restriction is found and no immediate connection is drawn. Unticking the box doesn’t cure the problem until reboot as well. But, that is what caused the problem, something to keep in mind as others ask the same question.