Explorer Hijacking

  • Thread starter Thread starter Sebastiaan Wessels
  • Start date Start date
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Sebastiaan Wessels

Hi..

Some or other program has highjacked my internet explorer and changed my
homepage to some search engine but the address bar shows about:blank even
though the page is loaded.

If I try to change my homepage to any other one, it just resets itself the
next time I go into Explorer.

I've run AntiSpy a number of times and every time it finds 2 spyware stuff.
It finds a SearchAssistant as well as telling me of a possible browser
highjacking... but when I remove them, again they just reset themselves to
their previous state.

ANY HELP PLEASE!!!
 
If you have SpyBot S&D installed, go to the "Immunize"
section.
Is "Lock IE Start Page Settings" ticked?
If so, uncheck it.

If that is not the problem, get and run these programs (if
you test after each one you can stop when the problem is
gone):
Ad-Aware:
http://www.lavasoftusa.com
Once installed make sure to update via online before
scanning!
and
Spybot - Search & Destroy -
http://security.kolla.de/
http://security.kolla.de/index.php?lang=en&page=download
http://spybot.eon.net.au/
http://www.tomcoyote.org/SPYBOT/
Once installed make sure to update via online before
scanning!
and
BHO Demon: http://www.spywareinfo.com/downloads/bhod/

Until the problem is solved.

If you still have problems, some ISP's provide a
customized version of IE. Some Web pages will also reset
your home page and do this. One of the customizations
they might make is to disable the ability to change the
home page, so that you are forced to use their home page.
You can re-enable this by making a small change in the
Windows registry.

In Regedit, navigate to this key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet
Explorer\Control Panel

In the right-hand pane, right-click the "HomePage" value,
then select Modify. Change it to: 00 00 00 00

Also change either or these to zero 0 instead of 1 if
present:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersi
on\Policies\Explorer] -
DWORD "NoSetHomePage"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet
Explorer\Restrictions] -
DWORD "NoSetHomePage"=dword:00000001

If you don't have this key, browse to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main

and in the right hand pane, double click "Local Page" and
set equal to "C:\WINDOWS\System\blank.htm" (no quotes)
which will hopefully set your Home Page to blank and then
allow you to subsequently modify it using Internet Options.

Exit regedit and reboot.

When you reboot, you should be able to change the home
page again.

Some pages will also download a program which keeps
changing it back. Go to Start | Run and type:
msconfig
and press <Enter> or click OK. Go to the Startup tab.
See if you can identify any suspicious programs. If you
can, uncheck it, If you can't, change the home page to
what you want and then uncheck one and then reboot. Try
IE. If the Web page changed, change it back and then try
msconfig again, rechecking the last one and unchecking the
next. Keep doing this until you find the culprit.



You might also want to look at this little program.
http://www.pjwalczak.com/spguard/
 
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