home page hijacker

[geekgirl]

anyone had to deal with a homepage hijacker? A client of mine who I see weekly is getting her homepage come up with a highly unsuitable one for her kids.

I keep doing the obvious stuff but when I go back so is it!!!

Any ideas?

[webmoriar]

Unless some hacker is personally doing it somehow it is probably spyware. Download Ad-Aware 6.0 and run that, if this is happening because someone visited a page that downloaded something then this should pick it up. Assuming the browser is MSIE6.0: You could try deleting all your cookies, temporary internet files, and history and then go to Tools > Internet Options and set your homepage to whatever you want and see if that works.

Sorry if I recommended something you have already tried.

[geekgirl]

I have done all the stuff you suggest apart from downloading the spyware thingy. Thanks I will try that next time I am at their house. I will try it out myself as well. Sounds like a good thing to have available.

Thanks again.

[webmoriar]

You're welcome. I hope it works, if not let me know and I will see if I can think of anything else.

[geekgirl]

Just ran it on my machine to check it out before doing at their house, found 11 items!! I am amazed, didn't even know they were wandering around in my system, cheeky monkies.

Thanks much appreciated.

[geekgirl]

We have now sorted it, I will be reccomending ad aware to other clients as well. Thanks again matey.

[webmoriar]

No problem. Glad I could help :D

[JWJ]

I recently became suspicious of how "targeted" I seem to be with regards to certain spam. I vaguely recalled a discussion about Spyware and ran a search through Statcounter. This was the thread I was looking for and I hastily downloaded Ad Aware as recommended.

On running it 11 data-mining objects were found ... and this is a brand new PC that I am still in the process of setting up. Remembering Geekgirls response, and not believing in coincidences I installed Ad Aware on an older machine. This time it found 30 objects.

I have been sitting back comfortable in the knowledge that my Firewall and Norton are keeping me safe, but how little I knew.

Thanks a million for this great advice ... I shall be more vigilant in future.

Regards
John

[webmoriar]

Glad it helped you out :D

Most likely though the data-miners are cookies. I don't know if you can configure your Firewall and/or Norton to stop cookies. I know you can turn them off in your browser unfortunatley many websites require them to work :( The only "solution" I have is to delete your cookies once in a while.

[geekgirl]

I have been using ad aware for a while now and it doesn't take long to work out which of the cookies can be put onto your ignore list and which ones you can just delete. Data miners are usually just cookies, the ones to watch out for are malware. These can be automatic diallers and other stuff.

Two of my clients have been stung by malware, it ran up a bill for £475 for one of them and £300 for the other. BT say they are liable for the costs and they have to pay.

Whichever way you look at it BT are earning bucks from it.

Cheers.