Google search results were hijacked by search.search-tab.com

My wife told me a few days ago that the links from Google search results were hijacked on our home computer. Clicking on links from google keyword search results in Firefox showed unrelated pages, but cutting and pasting the URLs in the address bar seemed to work fine.


She logs in as a restricted Windows user and has been doing Alt+F4 on any ad-window or unrelated pop-ups that beat Fire-fox's block pop-up settings.

Malware bytes's Anti-malware some times showed that it blocked illegal access to an IP address, but it did not happen every time unrelated content showed up. Running Malware scan or Norton did not find anything whether it was a quick scan or full scan. After googling for some time, the problem was found to be related to "keyword.url" configuration property accessed through "about:config" URL. This URL was pointing to "search.search-tab.com" on our home computer. So I reset this property, restarted Firefox to see this problem come up again and the URL was still pointing to search-tab.com.

So I decided to manually clean up this entry found in both user.js and prefs.js under
Documents and Settings/<username>/Application Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/.default/ directory.

So it seems to be working since then, but I wonder how long?