Sorry in advance if this is in the wrong forum - but I have recently been afflicted with a spyware/virus that launches pages from both IE and Firefox, and generally redirects you to pages that you were not trying to go to.

On top of all of this (as this was a new work laptop and I hadn't had the chance to put Spybot S&D - my favorite - on it yet), this bugger will prevent you from being able to access the safer-networking site, you can't even ping it. It completely blocks all internet traffic to this and other spyware programs' sites.

I finally was forced to put the IP and name into my HOSTS file, which allowed me to access the site to download Spybot and run it to *hopefully* clean my system.

For those who are not aware of the HOSTS file on Windows (I am sure that most on this forum are quite technically savvy, but I figured I would add this just in case), the file is normally located in:

c:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc

It is a file called HOSTS (with no extension)

Open it with NOTEPAD and at the bottom (normally it should just have the entry for the localhost), you would enter onto a new line the IP for the safer-networking.org site and the name for the site (i.e. www.safer-networking.org) - the IP I have now is 89.238.64.39 Once I did this, I was able to finally resolve and download Spybot to clean my computer.

In case anyone else runs into this problem, I hope this helps.

-Reptevye-