My WWW.Home Page

Shaners · May 23, 2004

My homepage has been this site since it's been alive.

However, just recently, I have gotten a bug in my system, that keeps wanting to change my homepage...

I downloaded and installed "Browser Hijacker" from PC-World, and it works OK, but it keeps "popping up" everytime this new page wants to take-over... (which is all the time)

This is really starting to "p"iss me off!!!

Any suggestions?

tmf6902 · May 23, 2004

download spybot search and destroy...you probably have some sort of piggyback that keep reseting your homepage...it'll find it and take it off.....run your antivirus too.

Frank S · May 23, 2004

You've got some serious spyware or possibly a virus.

Download and run Adaware (also do the check for updates so it gets all reference files) and also make sure that your virus protection is at the most current update it can be.

edit-Spybot is good too but be careful.Sometimes it can be overly agressive and you can end up taking out necessary files as well as spyware.

Shaners · May 23, 2004

I have "spy-bot" . I'm running it right now... thanks for the reminder!!!

elboberino · May 23, 2004

That's why I love my Mac, no spyware, no recent viruses, nothing to piss my computer off. But I feel your guys' pain, my girlfriend has a PC and I am always over there having to run Adware and Norton.

Shaners · May 23, 2004

I ran Spy-bot, and it only had one item that was questionable...

Sooo, I downloaded ad-aware from PC-World, and am now scanning for the third time... each time it finds more stuff!!! The first time was 18 items, the second was 1 item, and the last time was 4 items... A total of 23 items quaranteened.

Here's the problem though... everytime I run ad-aware, the browser hijacker program picks up another attempt to take-over my homepage...

It also kicked in while I was typing this message!!!

Frank S · May 23, 2004

Yep,you have some deeper rooted crap.The same thing happened to my boss's computer about 4 weeks ago and it took me 3 hours to finally track down the problem.Wish I could remember exactly what it was but I went through so many different programs and searches that day that I forget what happened.

Try using the custom scan on Adaware and going specifically the system 32 file as I think I may have had some success there.

Also,download spyware guard to help prevent future events such as this one.

pacodiablo · May 23, 2004

People who make programs that do things like take over your homepage should be beaten with a tire iron.

tmf6902 · May 24, 2004

Once you find the name of the program that is doing the bad stuff, goto the symantic website, because of the way the trojan is written you may not be able to just delete it, symantic will have instructions on how to remove it. They may have a special removal tool, or instructions on how to edit your registry, and/or the files to delete it. My wifes computer had a trojan on it, and the d**n thing had about 10 registry keys written, and had the files in 4 or 5 different places on the hard drive.

Once you get it removed you'll definatly want to get a virus protection program that has the ability to stop malicious scripts when you're surfing the web. I use Norton Anti Virus 2004, and run Zone alarm as a firewall, and I have a NAT firewall built into a router I use. It's a lot of protection, (still not enough for a smart hacker) but it stops pretty much everything and everyone that tries to get in.

Symnatec virus looker upper

Shaners · May 24, 2004

I'm running Norton 2003 + firewall...

I'm also running ad-aware, spybot, and browser hijacker...

This darn thing is pretty good about moving itself around on my hard-drive... because I can't seem to isolate it!!!

It's changing my homepage to find4u.net ...

Shotgun · May 24, 2004

Shaners,make sure you download the latest updates from spybot before running it and stay away from those porn sites

Elwood · May 24, 2004

I had the same problem, but running spybot and adware fixed it. I did download all the updates before I ran them too. Otherwise I don't know what to tell you.

tmf6902 · May 24, 2004

When in doubt reformat..LOL....did you find out what the name of it is? Or atleast the name of the file it's working out of. That'll make it a whole lot easier to beat.

elboberino · May 24, 2004

My roommate up at school is a computer engineer and he went into the code of the virus and changed it, making the virus useless. And Paco, I agree with you. I just wonder if the guys who write those programs ever have them infect their own computers. It'd be pretty funny if one of the programmers caught his own virus and his homepage was re-directed to some animal porn or something gross like that.

Wingnut · May 24, 2004

OK Shaners.

Computercops.biz is down right now, but it's the best place I know of to download and install/run a little bitty app called "Hijack This".

Click here for a different website that will also help you out.

What you do is download this app and run it. It will give you a list of questionable files...DO NOT DELETE THEM YET! You will keep a lot of them, but it will catch a TON of things that Ad-Aware, and Spybot wont.

You then copy/paste the log that Hijack This generates to either the Security-forums above, or to Computercops.biz forums.

Actually, if you read through the security-forums, somebody has probably already had your particular problem, and you wont even have to post your log, just look through the previous posts/logs.

Or....You could go here: Click meeeee! and download Hijack this, and post here, or PM your log to me, and I'll tell you what to fix/remove.

It's a great program, and will find things that are designed to get around Ad-Aware, and Spybot.