My Mac is getting weird redirects with Safari and Chrome, however not with Mozil

Question

My Mac is getting weird redirects with Safari and Chrome, however not with Mozilla Firefox. Since I cannot find software to do malware removal on Apple products or any good information, I am at a loss as to how to proceed after uninstalling and re-installing the affected browsers and deleting all the plugins/extensions, which did not work.

If anybody can point me to next steps, I would be greatly appreciative. Otherwise I guess I'll have to wipe the hard drive and re-install everything, which would be a huge hassle.

Other information:

If I ping an affected domain in the Terminal, I get the IP of the unwanted redirect (i.e. if i paste that IP into firefox and go it brings me to the wrong website for the domain I entered).

I am running mavericks.

So... yes. How would one proceed? And... if you know... why would the issue affect two browsers and the ping command, but not Firefox?

Explanation / Answer

You may also want to look in ~/Library/LaunchAgents as well as ~Library/LaunchDaemons for a file consisting of a series of numbers and letters. The sequence of these characters will be the same in both directories. Send them both to the trash (you will be asked to login), then empty trash on restart.

Another method to unhijack the browser is to Force-Quit Safari, turn off wi-fi from the menu bar (or disconnect ethernet), open Safari while holding down shift, which will then bring up the "Can't connect to server" message. Go to Safari History in the menu and select Remove all History and Web Data, which will allow you to remove as much or little as you need. Quit Safari, reconnect wi-fi, reopen Safari while holding Shift, and that should get your browser back.

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