Can you go to those sites? www.microsoft.com www.symantec.com www.mcafee.com
Try with some other browser, like Chrome or even Internet Explorer.
Do you still get redirected?
If you can, it's probably not a viral infection, as those sites are frequently the firsts one that malewares attempt to prevent you from reatching.
Anyway, do a full virus scan.
I use AVG free. Available here: free.avg.com/ww-en/homepage. It's a prety good antivirus, that, in my experience, appears to be beter than norton AV.
Also, do an adware scan. For that, I recomend Spybot search and destroy. Available FREE at www.safer-networking.org
Idealy, you should do those scans while in safe mode.
Open the file \WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts in notepad or wordpad. It's a simple extention less text file.
Does it contain references to the site that you have problem reatching? If so, just remove the offending line and save the change.
If after that you still get redirected, the problem is probably NOT on your side.
It can be any of the followings:
DNS poisoning. The address resolution server have been injected with eroneous IP address for some sites.
The site you attempt to access willfully contains the redirection. Probably a font to succer you into vewing content that you don't want to see.
The IP address of the site have been hijacked. Somebody re-registered the domain name with another IP address or requested an IP address change that was granted without verification.
The site have been compromised by some one, usualy with some criminal intent.
In any of those cases, there is nothing that you can do as the problem is exterior to your location. The best you can do is to attempt to notify the site owner about the problem.
Kualinar, February 2010
