I’ve been defiled! My home page is now “about:blank”! I have become one of my customers. Yes, my browser is hijacked! I think this is the BrillantDigital one that is so stinking nasty. Certainly explains the sudden performance issues that had me rebooting. I thought the streaming was killing my machine (could have been the open port on 8081 that let this happen but I can’t be sure). I also had a couple of worms. Looks like I may spend the morning cleaning my machine instead of getting work done.
- Remove old adaware
- Run Spybot Search N Destory
- Update Avast
- Run CWShredder (wow! CWShredder moves around a lot. Used to be by intermute but Trendmicro is maintaining it) and HijackThis
- Reboot after Spybot’s removals and Avast’s prompting for a reboot.
- Install new adaware
- Launch Trendmicro’s Housecall
- Run Avast
- Run Spybot
- Run Adaware
- After my computer beeped 5000 times (the number of popups blocked by Adwatch) I rebooted.
- Restarted Avast scan
- 2nd Ad-aware scan
- Checked Add/Remove programs for offending software
- Removed View Point
- Used Regedit to manually inspect registry..looks good
- Totally afraid to open Internet Explorer or Outlook..thank goodness for Firefox!
- Recovered Homepage (no longer about:blank) but IE won’t remember cookies implying that something still has me. Performance on machine down.
- Downloaded and installed MS Antispy(been needing to evaluate it anyway)
- Oh, the new version of adwatch blocks tracking cookies ergo my website info wasn’t saving. Think I’m in the clear now.
