HijackThis
not long ago i was recommending to someone here who was the victim of a browser hijacking that they try HijackThis. ( #reply-19078441 )
at the time i had not personally used it, but i had spent lots of time reading the accompanying forum where users post their scan results and wait for hijack help.
this morning i awoke to find that my IE start page URL value had been changed (i actually have it set to blank page for faster loading). i knew right away i was the victim of a drive by hijacking.
amazingly i have about four anti-spyware tools loaded that woulda shoulda coulda stopped this PIA hijacker, but didn't.
i went right to HijackThis ( tomcoyote.org ), downloaded it and ran the executable. first thing i noticed on the scan results was a suspicious looking url.... superwebsearch.com
but i'm patient, and didn't want to "fix" the wrong things, so i followed protocol and saved the results to a notepad log file and pasted same to the spywareinfo support forums, requesting assistance.
sure enough, a helpful fellow who i have had the pleasure of meeting on a variety of forums was there within minutes to confirm my suspicions and then some.
after a few shots at deleting the superwebsearch.com entries (i say few because with so many anti-spy programs running, at least one had a setting that was preventing HijackThis from putting things back together again), everything started looking great again.
anyway, long story short, i want folks here to know that HijackThis is a very viable option for ridding your computer of crap that may get past the first line of anti-spy defense you have in place.
to the best of my knowledge, because i keep every program database up to date, this must be a new exploit that found me this morning.
everything is completely back to normal and it took only a few minutes total to weed out the bad registry entries.
hth |
