I have this really annoying piece of malware running on one of my workstations. It’s purpose is unknown, it could even be a reminant of a past peice of software. It’s dug itself into explorer.exe and iexplore.exe somehow. Every time one of those apps are opened or when there is an action in those apps an informational dialog pops up and states:
“As part of the Tools for Internet Explorer, we have now activated Safe Shopping Features for your browser.
It provides you with information about merchants we have identified as safe providers of goods or services. We automatically identify you as one of our users to these merchants.”
I’m fairly certain this is not part of the “Tools for Internet Explorer” and that this was not purposely installed. It is annoying to the point that almost no actual work can be done on this machine. I’ve been battling malware for years and none of my usuall methods work. No funny dlls are loaded at startup, no odd processes, no unwanted apps installed, no known active X extensions installed, nothing. The newest version of Symantec AV does not pick it up, nor does ad-aware. I took a screenshot of the dialog if you are interested. You can find it with the link below.
http://mikeshultz.com/screenshot.jpg
If anyone has any ideas, I would appreciate them.