C
CheshireCat
A friend called round for a lan party at weekend with his pc.
At home he lives in a shared house and they don't have internet access so he
rarely gets a chance to go online. We're on cable broadband, so he spent
some time having a surf to make up for it.
I noticed he had Windows XP with norton internet security installed
Anyway, he suddenly started complaining about a host of popup windows,
ie/explorer/control panel wouldn't open and the pc slowed down. His pc had
just been hijacked and I noticed he had optimizer.exe and bargain.exe
running as processes. Disabling them stopped the popups but didn't speed the
pc up or allow access to ie/explorer/control panel.
We had to go kep switching between safe/normal mode to diagnose and fix.We
ran adaware and spybot which cleared these 2 from the system, but the other
problems were still there.
Disabled 3rd party browser helpers from ie and speed went back up so it
showed there was something else not found by the 2 antispyware apps.
Toolbarcop finally revealed jimmyhelp.
I'm mentioning it here because
1) a google on jimmyhelp brought up so little
2) it wasn't spotted by 2 of the most popupar antispyware apps
3) I wonder if the 3 bhos are being installed together as symptoms appeared
at the same time
3) I've beein seeing several people complaining of similar symtoms in the
microsoft groups so I'm concerned that it may be a newly occuring problem.
At home he lives in a shared house and they don't have internet access so he
rarely gets a chance to go online. We're on cable broadband, so he spent
some time having a surf to make up for it.
I noticed he had Windows XP with norton internet security installed
Anyway, he suddenly started complaining about a host of popup windows,
ie/explorer/control panel wouldn't open and the pc slowed down. His pc had
just been hijacked and I noticed he had optimizer.exe and bargain.exe
running as processes. Disabling them stopped the popups but didn't speed the
pc up or allow access to ie/explorer/control panel.
We had to go kep switching between safe/normal mode to diagnose and fix.We
ran adaware and spybot which cleared these 2 from the system, but the other
problems were still there.
Disabled 3rd party browser helpers from ie and speed went back up so it
showed there was something else not found by the 2 antispyware apps.
Toolbarcop finally revealed jimmyhelp.
I'm mentioning it here because
1) a google on jimmyhelp brought up so little
2) it wasn't spotted by 2 of the most popupar antispyware apps
3) I wonder if the 3 bhos are being installed together as symptoms appeared
at the same time
3) I've beein seeing several people complaining of similar symtoms in the
microsoft groups so I'm concerned that it may be a newly occuring problem.