Invasion By Unwanted Web Site

[strawberry]

Hi All,

I went on to a web site which has taken over my Explorer and I can't get rid of it. can anyone advise me. I've gone all over my PC but it won't delete. The main problem is that I have young people here using my PC and its heavy porn.If I was 40 years younger it would be appreciated but not now.

What is happening for me is that I keep getting a page headed ''blank'' and alsothe webpage I'm getting is www.searchmeup.com and it also comes up with the name ''coolweb search''.

I have also 3 icons on mydesktop which also not delete.

Regards Joe

[kurtdhis]

Download Ad-Aware 6.0 from http://www.lavasoft.com Run it and it should remove the nasty malware. Other than that, go to Internet settings (tools tab on your browser),and in the space provided to select your start or "home page" , type in any other site. If it is malware, it will most probably reset the page to the offending site. So it is best if you download the malware remover.

[bkk_mike]

If AdAware doesn't find it - it's possible it's the qhost Trojan (or similar).

That will play around with your hosts file etc., so that sites get redirected to other sites. - i.e. enter www.google.com - and it doesn't go to google. But it will delete itself after it's done it, so Adaware and anti-virus after the fact won't pick it up.

Obviously run Adaware first, it could be some other malware. If it's still a problem after that though, check for a \bdtmp\tmp directory on either your C: drive or your windows drive. If the directory exists and is empty, it's almost certainly qhost.

A good set of instructions for fixing it (after running a virus scan) are at http://www.f-prot.com/virusinfo/descriptions/qhost_a.html

[Yohan]

Several possibilities:

Who needs Microsoft?

What about download an other web-browser, like OPERA with Java?

www.opera.com

and un-install microsoft explorer.....(you might re-install it later again)

What about

www.panicware.com

download there the FREE Pop-up stopper and install it....this helps a lot...

Ad Aware from Lavasoft is also a good idea....

Also open the properties of the Microsoft Explorer and delete

all cookies,

all temp files including all offline contents,

all history

and reset the starting page with *blank*

Is your antivirus software up to date?

it is always possible, with some patience, to remove such idiot-stuff out of the computer.

Johann

[katana]

Hi,

Sounds like you have a CoolWebSearch infection. Download Merijn Bellekom's CWS shredder, a program specially written to remove this.

http://www.spywareinfo.com/downloads/tools/CWShredder.exe

Place it in it's own folder, and with all browser windows closed, run it, click on fix (not scan) and let it clean up all it finds. Then reboot.

Unfortunately, the 'nice' people who make Coolwebsearch continually update their homepage hijacker to make it harder and harder to remove. So if you have a new variant, this may not help.

Anyhow, its worth a try.

Hope that may be of some help.

[ubergnome]

See the threads on Spyware here, and Browser Window Hijacking on the support forum...if you haven't already.

It will take some time but you can defeat these critters, and there are a lot of them on your machine.