D
David
I've spent a good few hours over the past week ridding 2 windows XP pc's of
a browser hijacker. Non of the available spy-ware detectors was able to
remove all traces of "coolwebsearch" and a lot of manual reg editing and
searching for default settings was involved in cleaning the machines.
Reading through the IE6 newsgroup it looks like about a quarter of the posts
are related to similar problems which equates to a lot of hours being wasted
dealing with this menace.
Over the years in which I have been using PC's both at work and at home I
have only twice had to remove a virus from machines and found it a lot
easier to deal with than this latest attack.
Both PC's are up to date with virus protection and sit behind a firewall yet
they were both infected - in both cases my children downloaded and installed
what claimed to be an MSN Messenger "Add-On" So why do I continue to pay
Symantec for "virus definition updates" when it doesn't protect my machine?
I realise that they don't fall into the strict definition of a virus - they
don't replicate and didn't spread across my network. But they do re-infect a
cleaned machine each time it boots and they re-infect a browser each time it
is launched. The content being offered was highly inappropriate and the
ability to circumvent browser security settings was very worrying.
These redirections are to commercial pages - surely as a first step these
sites should be shut down and their host isp fined heavily to discourage
anyone else from putting them up.
I consider myself to be fairly well informed in IT matters yet this was the
first time I was aware of how prevalent these "scumware" infections were.
This looks like a much more serious problem than even the "blaster" outbreak
(which caused problems on my network at work - although most of the problems
were due to some knee jerk "blaster profing" being carried out by our IT
dept.and not due to any virus activity as such) and should be being taken
more seriously than it is.
David
a browser hijacker. Non of the available spy-ware detectors was able to
remove all traces of "coolwebsearch" and a lot of manual reg editing and
searching for default settings was involved in cleaning the machines.
Reading through the IE6 newsgroup it looks like about a quarter of the posts
are related to similar problems which equates to a lot of hours being wasted
dealing with this menace.
Over the years in which I have been using PC's both at work and at home I
have only twice had to remove a virus from machines and found it a lot
easier to deal with than this latest attack.
Both PC's are up to date with virus protection and sit behind a firewall yet
they were both infected - in both cases my children downloaded and installed
what claimed to be an MSN Messenger "Add-On" So why do I continue to pay
Symantec for "virus definition updates" when it doesn't protect my machine?
I realise that they don't fall into the strict definition of a virus - they
don't replicate and didn't spread across my network. But they do re-infect a
cleaned machine each time it boots and they re-infect a browser each time it
is launched. The content being offered was highly inappropriate and the
ability to circumvent browser security settings was very worrying.
These redirections are to commercial pages - surely as a first step these
sites should be shut down and their host isp fined heavily to discourage
anyone else from putting them up.
I consider myself to be fairly well informed in IT matters yet this was the
first time I was aware of how prevalent these "scumware" infections were.
This looks like a much more serious problem than even the "blaster" outbreak
(which caused problems on my network at work - although most of the problems
were due to some knee jerk "blaster profing" being carried out by our IT
dept.and not due to any virus activity as such) and should be being taken
more seriously than it is.
David