I think I have some weird firefox website certification virus?

Morblitz

Hey guys, another computer thread.
I've been putting my computer on standby instead of switching it off the last couple days because I've been working on a paper and I have a bunch of research up. I hopped onto it this morning and tried to go to google, and I got an untrusted site warning. I was tired and thought my exceptions reset or something, so I allowed it. Now whenever I go to youtube, facebook, or basically any site, it adds https to the url and despite my account information still functioning, the sites themselves will run like shit. For example, facebook barely loads, only the text on the site, nothing else. Youtube will load, but will look weird, my username is missing the M for morblitz, and every video has on the thumbnail a text that says 'no thumbnail available'. If I click on a video, it'll load the page, but the video won't play.

The weird thing is, if I follow a direct link, or open up a book marked video, facebook and youtube work absolutely fine. It's only when I manually go there myself does it seem shady. I have chrome, I'm using it now, and it all works perfectly. So I think I've fucked something up with this exceptions stuff, so I went to go reset some of them. Boy do I have some weird sounding exceptions in the authorities part of the certificate manager, foreign language kind of thing. If I select 'delete or distrust', they go away, but if I press okay and close the window, the certificates re-allow themselves. I don't really know what to do, my mcafee protection isn't finding anything, I'm also running malware bytes and search and destroy. I've tried to google the problem but it's such a vague issue that I can't find anything. Does anyone have any idea what's going on here? Do I have a virus? I will say in the process of trying to find out what's happening, my AVG protection detected and blocked a trojan (I don't know why AVG caught that and not mcafee, since it's supposed to be better), I guess it's too much of a coincidence to ignore.
I'm also afraid of restarting/turning off my computer in case it won't turn back on again, and am doing my best to backup my work.
Thanks in advance.

Tejs

So, this is only affecting Firefox?

If so, uninstall Firefox and do a fresh install.

When you say you follow a 'direct link' what do you mean? Like http://www.google.com/something/ or like http://74.125.227.17/something?

Morblitz

The first one, although my brother was linking me to facebook pictures before, and the page would load very strangely, so maybe even links don't work. I assumed they did because I can watch imbedded videos and open bookmarks fine. Is it weird for me to type in a website, such as www.youtube.com and have the browser automatically change it to https://.www.youtube.com? Googling tells me that https indicates that it's secure, but the sites I get send to look so shady. I've never had it add the s before. If I do it on chrome, it remains www.youtube.com

I realise how silly I must sound asking if something with http in it is normal.

And yeah it is only affecting firefox, chrome is operating just fine.
I'll try a reinstall of firefox.

Morblitz

Okay, I uninstalled it, downloaded a newer version, and re-installed it. Same issues. Hrm. I think I kept my personal information because I didn't want to lose my bookmarks. I'll see if I can back them up and do a complete uninstall. I'm quite tired and not really thinking clearly.

Edit:
Alrighty, I didn't keep any personal settings and that seems to have done the trick. I don't get the https redirect, and things like youtube actually play, and websites now act how they're supposed to act when I view their websitey goodness.
My malware bytes seems to have picked up about 3 objects, too. So I'm hoping after the scan is finished I can get rid of them and wrap all this up. It's very stressful when I have stuff due soon.
Do you think my account information on any of these sites are compromised? I never actually logged into anything during this time, all my information was already saved.
Thanks for the tip, I was trying to kill the exceptions instead of just re-installing the damned thing. Do you have any idea what it might have been? I've never seen this one before.

Edit edit:
Okay, it's happening again. I just tried to open up one of my bookmarks that went to a youtube video, and it's telling me now that the connection is untrusted. I'm going to stay the hell away from that stuff from now on, but I just have no idea why it keeps giving me this untrusted bullshit. It looks pretty mundane, too. It says the connection to www.youtube.com is unsecure, and not some random shady website.

I guess I'll stick to chrome for the time being.

I can go to facebook and google without getting the weird untrusted connection thing, but I get it when I go to youtube. Ugh.

More edits:
Just got one of the untrusted warnings on facebook on CHROME now. Chrome was a bit more clear though, in their warning it indicated that the https part of the url was suspect.
What the fuck is going on?

L Ron Howard

Is the date and time on your system correct?
If your system clock is set to the future you may get that, or if it's in the past. If it's too far in the future, you will get the "certificate expired" notice.

Morblitz

Well would you look at that. I don't know how or why, but my calender was set to May. I must be more tired than I thought, I glanced at it down in the corner of the toolbar earlier and thought it was accurate. I am not having a very smart day.

That seems to have stopped the untrusted connection warnings though.
I guess the malware my scanners were picking up must have been coincidences after all. Still a bit disconcerting I had them already floating around my PC, and I don't know why I got a random trojan block whilst I was trying to figure out what was going on.

I'm relieved that it's something pretty minor, I really didn't want there to be a chance of my computer being inaccessible right now.
I think we can consider this problem solved. Thanks a lot guys.

L Ron Howard

You should also make sure that the system is set up to get date and time information from the internet.

Morblitz

Good call. Just enabled it. Thanks.