Last patch Malicious or has a virus

Question

This is more information than a question. I routinely click on updates for the flash player automatically, but thie time the intstall was viscious. The most recognizable symptom is that it overwrote my home page and even after I restored it, everytime the computer booted it overwrote it again, with some sort of "one..." screen and a yahoo search. I couldn't figure out how to get rid of the malicious effects and finally did a system restore prior to that  point of the update. It was the only change to system since the restore point and as soon as I restored to the old point, which fixed the internet option problem back to what it was before, I started getting messages to do an adobe update again. This is part of the problem, not the solution. I want to, at a minimum, stop being told to update it every time I reboot the computer. I will never update if it continues to have those malicious effects. I have a standare, high end Intel/Microsoft Win64 system with nvidia video card. The question is how do I stop the notificiations or install the update without the malicious bullying of taking over my internet options.

Answer 1

The Flash software doesn't carry a virus. However, you could have had some malware installed that was designed to look similar to a flash update install window. This is very common among malware/viruses, as they generally make themselves look just like other types of software people will click on. As a person who regularly removes viruses from 10 computers a day, I would say that the timing of the virus/malware and the flash update install was purely coincidental. You could have had that virus on there for days/weeks before it went active and started showing you and changing things. Try running malwarebytes, that is a good tool to remove some typical malware/viruses in conjunction with an antivirus software. I prefer AVG.