[thelist] RE: browser hijacking

Timothy Kuhn (CW) tkuhn-cw at starbucks.com
Wed Jan 19 16:45:00 CST 2005



I have been through this myself and it is a tough one to beat. I ended
up purchasing Ad-Aware SE Professional Edition and it is worth every
penny. This is what I did, update Ad-Aware, disconnect from the
internet. Run a scan, delete all the bad guys. Reboot in safe mode and
scan again, delete bad guys if they are still there. Run another scan
with the last option on the list, I can't remember what it is. It is not
"smart scan" or "scan all drives", it is the last option on the list.
Delete bad things if there are any, I doubt there will be. Restart and
you should be good. If that doesn't work search for CoolWeb Search
combined with Ad-Aware and you should be able to find fixes in their
knowledge base. That worked for me. I tried CWShredder and that didn't
work by the way. My advice for avoiding this in the future is surf with
FireFox with cookies disabled when you can. Good luck.

-----Original Message-----
Hello all,

I have a bit of a dilemma. I believe my home computer has been hijacked
(to
some degree).

Here are my symptoms:

	I cannot access one particular website via the internet
(www.power-sonic.com)
	Sometimes Google (my home page) is not Google, but some other
website - but the address bar say www.google.com/

I have run about 9 different spyware checkers, and anti-hijack programs
including:

	Adaware (says I am clean)
	Spybot Search & Destroy (says I am clean)
	Spy Sweeper (says I am clean)

The other spyware programs are all over the place telling me that I have
CoolSearchWWW and PeopleonPages, various registry entries, tracking
cookies,
etc.

I have run Hijack This and is looks as though any malicious items have
been
removed and that what is running is legitimate.

My problem is this - I am still having issues accessing the site and
with
Google. It is very frustrating since it is a sporadic occurrence -
sometimes
I do a spyware check and delete a cookie and everything is fine. Then a
while later I am having problems again - run a spyware check and it find
nothing.

What do you do when Spybot and HiJack This both tell you that your
machine
is fine, but you are still experiencing problems?=20

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

markJ
=09

--=20



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