Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of winters101stabd
winters101stabd

asked on

Can't access anti virus websites

Recently i haven't been able to access anti virus websites, www.symantec.com, www.grisoft.cz, etc. Therefore i can't see what virus i have to get rid of, i also can't updates my virus protection, because i am blocked from the websites. What do i need to do to get rid of this problem.

Thank You.
Avatar of SunBow
SunBow
Flag of United States of America image

Start by installing a blocker, such as personal firewall from ZoneLabs, then upgrade all you MS SW.

Check out your startup folder and event log and taskmanager for offenders. Once they are disposed of, you'll probably have to reload A/V again, if a culprit disabled it. (worst case, rebuild the OS from scratch)

It isn't a virus in many cases, but an adware or spyware that disables AV, if not a remote control program. Disable smpt and so not do online chats or running of suspicious materiel. See SpyBot and Adaware for other detections.
Check your hosts file by opening it in notepad:

c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

If you see any entries that look like this:

0.0.0.0     www.symantec.com

or

127.0.0.1     www.symantec.com

or similar for AV sites, delete those lines.

Your browser checks this hosts file before it checks DNS, so some of the new viruses/worms like to modify your hosts file so you can't get to those sites.  Once you delete these lines, you should be able to get to the AV sites.
Avatar of dorkestra
dorkestra

I agree it sounds like a host file issue. If it truly is host file entries then you'll be able to access these sites numerically by typing their ip's in the address bar

www.grisoft.com is 193.86.103.19

symantec.com is 206.204.212.69

housecall.trendmicro.com is 66.35.255.32
Avatar of winters101stabd

ASKER

I looked in the host file, and nothing is there.....
Just a little readme paragraph....

Any other ideas?
Another file to check is lmhosts.sam in the same directory (I'm actually not to familiar with the Windows hosts files, but I believe this one is similar to "hosts").

I'd also suggest trying dorkestra's idea of using the IP addresses.  If you do, you may want to just download the latest AV program from scratch, because the updaters still may not work.
The files "hosts" and "lmhosts" are the live ones.  "hosts.sam" and "lmhosts.sam" are SAMples of what these files would look like, supplied with the OS, and nothing actually uses them!  So don't bother with lmhosts.sam.

One of our users here recently couldn't get to any sites.  ping and nslookup were working fine, but the browser couldn't get DNS resolutions.  No idea why -- a reboot fixed it.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of rossfingal
rossfingal
Flag of United States of America image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Rossfingal! That CWShredder program seemed to work. I can now get into www.symantec.com, but when i goto www.grisoft.cz i can get it,  but i can't translate the page to english, so i'm wondering if thats just a problem with their page. (i had been to another anti virus site, and couldn't get to the english section). Thanks for your help.

Sincerely,
Michael.
Hi!

I'm glad someone here could help you!

You could post your Hijack This log here and maybe we could see if there's some type of restriction on Internet Explorer
as regards the language problem.

Thanks and good luck!
Hi,

I have just finish solving a problem similar to yours: I could not run any part of my
Norton Internet Security 2004 on Windows 2000. and I could not open the symantec web site.
The reason was a virus on my system that block the web access to symantec and to Norton Internet Security 2004 on my pc.
The solution: go to http://www.pandasoftware.com/activescan/  and scan your pc to remove the virus, then remove Norton Internet Security 2004 and reinstall.

It help me hope it will help you too.

Doron.