A few days ago I started having real problems with my laptop, it became infected with some kind of malware or adware virus.

Sometimes when I searched for things in Google and click on the search results link, I’d get redirected to other websites, ones that I wasn’t expecting. For example, I would do a search for “spyware” or “adware” and click on the results in Google. When I clicked on a link in the results that was for a specific malware troubleshooting forum for instance, I’d be redirected to a page with a list of links for various spam sites instead.

I could see the specific URL in green font in the search results that I was supposed to be going to, so I knew what site to expect, but would instead go to weird sites. I noticed that my results were being redirected through several different sites, including various subdomains of goored.com and ya-delivery.com. (Both of these have the same owner based on the Whois info.)

After doing lots of research online I downloaded and ran Malwarebytes, Spybot, HijackThis, Ad-Adware and a few others as well, but nothing seemed to work. Whether I used the Firefox or the Internet Explorer browser, I kept getting randomly redirected to all kinds of spammy sites.

The thing that happened to me next is the reason this story is getting published on a secondary ticket market news blog. When I did a search for the phrase “Young Frankenstein tickets” (without the quotes) in Google and clicked on the results such as the Ticketmaster link (which was #1) or the TicketsNow link, I was redirected to the StubHub home page instead! In fact this happened every time I did the search and clicked on any result. I recorded myself doing it and getting redirected and did a Camtasia screen capture, see below.

Now I am not accusing Stub Hub of anything because I don’t know if they are even aware of this. I imagine that there are a lot of unscrupulous companies and organizations out there that would want their sites to be the ones to show up in these search engine redirections and are willing to pay. So why is the Stub Hub home page showing up in these redirectons? Maybe Stub Hub is deliberately part of this malware/adware program. Or more likely, an affiliate that gets paid by Stub Hub is the one causing this. If that’s the case, Stub Hub should find out who’s responsible and ban them.

Or maybe Stub Hub doesn’t know about this. Maybe this was something unique to my computer system and environment. But is is certainly very strange.

Watch the Camtasia screen capture of it actually happening:

Watch the video recording: