Can ping the ip-Address but not the site and neither browse to it

Question

Due to some malware or virus, I was unable to connect to any site while the connection showed "Internet Access".
On experimenting, I found that I was able to ping the I.P. address of google. But when I gave the gave the following command, it gave an error saying that there was no entry of "google.com" in the host file.

ping google.com

I figured that it was some problem with my DNS then. So I tried to open the site google by its IP address but i was still unable to do so. So i googled up on the net and came accross many solutions to similiar problems.

• One was to flush the DNS, but to no avail.

• Another was to tunnel away through vpn and then browse internet, but I wanted a solution not just a way to browse the internet. Whatever damage was done, it still remained.

• Someone wrote that its some malware that corrupted my winsock. I don't know what winsock is, but I downloaded winsockrepair tool but it did not work out either.

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Then I Came across a software Cintrepair or Complete Internet Repair. I executed it and after restarting my internet started working properly. But now I don't know what was the thing that went wrong.
Can someone tell me what could have possibly gone wrong and what is the manual way of correcting it , not through an application.

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I had been thinking which forum I should post this question to. And I thought this was the most relevant forum for such a question. This is my first post in this forum so kindly tell me if I have missed any guidelines. I have tried my best to explain the situation in the most simple way.
Kindly explain the answer and please avoid using very high level language. I am not very experienced with networking and usually things go over my head. Thank You :)

Answer 1

Given that the problem is gone now, it is pure speculation to what the cause could be.

Often malware changes the proxy server of your internet connection to an internal component of the malware so all traffic is monitored. You can find this setting here:

1. Open your Control Panel
2. Go to Internet Options
3. Access the tab Connections
4. Click the button LAN settings
5. at the bottom, you see the Proxy Server settings. This should be unchecked and blank.

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Given the comments that you tested this and with the feedback supplied, another thing that comes to mind is an edited hosts file. But given that the hosts file does not have wildcard ability, it would've been full with sites you visit often.

The hosts file is a textfile located at:

c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc

Answer 2

When you have an unidentified malware or virus on your machine, the best solution is almost always to back up all your personal files to external media, and then reinstall the whole system from scratch.

It's the only way to be sure that the malware is gone and it is usually less work than identifying the malware, removing it manually and fixing everything it broke (and requires a lot less computing know-how).