The Strange Case of the Google Ads

[ImagenAshyun]

Spoiler:

I've ran AVG, Malwarebytes, CCleaner, and even Spybot for a few days in a row now. I've removed infected files left and right, but those ads won't go away. Furthermore, this computer's Chrome has Adblock. I'm fairly certain this isn't a Google.com thing, as none of the other computers in the house has this issue.

This laptop is a Windows 8, 64 bit. It runs on 4 GB RAM, which makes it the most powerful computer in my whole family's possession (sad, I know). The fact it lags horribly and pops ads everytime I don't click on a link on a website is really frustrating me.

I'm at a loss of what else I can do to clean up the adware.


ADDED: In one of my virus/malware scans, WoW.exe was shown to be infected, as well as the laptop's USB Security Guard. As a result, the laptop stopped reading my WD Passport portable hard drive on 2 out of 3 USB drives. Should I attempt to connect, even after a scan and removal of infected files, the Passport would disconnect and be completely unreadable. This is a problem because my Passport contains my WoW folders, and it is my only means of entering the game as long as I don't have my own computer.

I'm not sure if the borked USB drives are related to the adware infections. The biggest number of infected files I found was through Malwarebytes (54 infected files).

[Alpharius]

It could be infecting the browser itself. This is quite common and I've had it happen to me more times than I care to count. If you can figure out the ad's name, do a google search and it should be able to run you through a step by step process in which it gets rid of individual files and you may even have to go into the registry itself. Try some other browsers (Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer) and see if it hapopens there. If it does, it's obviously beyond the browser being infected.

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/adwcleaner/ Give this a spin as well.

Take a look at your task manager and just see if there are any funny looking processes running. If you find them, disconnect yourself from the internet, right click it, go to open file location, and then go back to the task manager and shut it down. Then just look up the .exe or file name on google and check out the steps there (or post it here and we can help.)

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So this is most likely malware, so I would start looking at malware removing software.