Does this sound like the symptom's of a small virus?

[Dan3345]

I went down into my garage to get some stuff, and realized my dad left his computer on. I go to turn it off, and the screen comes on and its his ebay page, except... It's covered in male pleasure things, and the recent searches are of things you would expect to see a prepubescent boy searching for.. And the recently viewed are all pornographic things in nature.

As anyone can attest it's deeply disturbing to see anything like this from your parents..Luckily though this is extremely out of character for my dad, and I have reason to believe it was a virus that did this and not him.

My theory is this: My dad loves cars, and he often goes on some car forums. As with all forum's for all sorts of things there are the well known ones, and the lesser known lesser traversed ones. My dad frequents many of them varying from the popular ones to the little known ones.  I am thinking that on one of them, the scripts on the page may have had a virus embedded in it, or perhaps an advertisement had one. Maybe it was even in a link he clicked from another user without knowing.  My dad is not very tech savvy and while he knows about the dangers of viruses, he is not very knowledgable when it comes to avoiding them.

My evidence to back up the virus theory is that I signed into his ebay account on my personal computer and looked at the search history and the recently viewed and... I couldn't see any of these things. None, I could see the recent searches that are in character for my dad, bikes, and auto parts. I noted that what I could see on my computer were the same things I could see below the pornographic things. I am under the impression that like many other websites that you log into, your browsing history and recent searches do not change from computer to computer.  As long as you are signed into the same account they should be the same shouldn't they?

If that's the case wouldn't this suggest there is a virus on his computer, because I can't see any of these things on mine, even though they are clearly on his. And remember I have signed into the exact same account (his account) on my computer. I think I mentioned this, but I will reiterate or state in case I forgot that: I could see the recent searches, but they were the ones I would expect to see from my dad. Except on his they were extremely pornographic and out of character for my dad.

So any advice or thoughts would be appreciated. Tomorrow I will run malware bytes on his computer. And sorry for the rambling and lack of coherence, I'm a bit weirded out.

Edit: and sorry if this is in the wrong place, or if it's an innapropriate topic. I really don't know where else to ask this and the hardware forum is always helpful.

Edited March 26, 2013 by Dan3345

[Thor.]

Its a virus no questions asked, if you need a free yet heavy duty antivirus i suggest Lavasofts antivirus-malware remover, it does a wonderful job at what its designed to do, and does it well.

http://www.lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware_free.php
it uses very little cpu and memory resources

and spybot search and destroy

http://www.safer-networking.org/

and sandboxie for isolating applications

 

http://www.sandboxie.com/

Edited March 26, 2013 by Thor.

[FMod]

Dan3345, on 26 Mar 2013 - 05:03, said:

My dad frequents many of them varying from the popular ones to the little known ones.  I am thinking that on one of them, the scripts on the page may have had a virus embedded in it, or perhaps an advertisement had one.

It's very unlikely to get a trojan (even less a virus) this way. Reasonably modern OS and browsers don't just run whatever they come across and give it full access to system files.

 

Almost always getting a trojan happens through voluntarily downloading a piece of software and installing it. Then you get the user to click all the confirmations.

Anyway, run the scanners.

 

Also, NEVER, ever, log into anything on a computer you SUSPECT might be compromised.

[Dan3345]

Thanks guys. I took screen shots which due to the content I will not be uploading or linking too. Needless to say, when I compared the screeenshots of his "ebay" page on his computer, to ebay (signed in as him) on mine, there are some slight differences. The most obvious one is that all recent searches/recently viewed items on my computer have a timestamp of when they were viewed. The ebay pages in the screenshot do not. None of them do actually, not even the normal searches and item views.

 

Heck, I need to scan his computer now.