HIJACKING
Mon Oct-11-2004
What is it with these people who think you shouldn't be allowed to go where you want to go and read what you want to read without having their pop-ups and homepages in your face? See this article for instance. They change your homepage, forcing you to use an inferior "Search Engine" which is nothing more or less than a directory of their advertisers. One of the most insidious is CoolWeb, which took over a brand new machine before we had time to bring it up to Service Pack 2 security level.
As of this writing, a House and Senate version of a bill to criminalize spyware have been proposed, and have to be reconciled in committee before moving to legislation. This will take a while, and may have very little impact on those who are committed to wrecking your machine or selling you stuff you won't want. What do you do in the meantime?
First, inform yourself about the problems that these programs cause, and how you contract them.
Second, test your computer for their presence.
Third, if they are infesting your machine, follow the prescribed measures to get rid of them.
You won't likely want to try removing each of the offenders by hand, but you can if you're not afraid of a little work and the possibility of messing up your registry :) Much more efficient is to find a good spyware removal program, like Ad-Aware and Spybot, and run not just one, but both. Sometimes you have to run them more than once to completely cleanse the system.
Fourth, put software in place that protects you against further infection.
You already know about Norton and McAfee and Grisoft, but how about browser hijacking? A comprehensive article with excellent advice on dealing with this problem is at Spywareinfo.com. There is also CWShredder.
You might take seriously the advice to dump Internet Explorer and its relatives, and go with a non-Microsoft-based browser like Firefox or Opera. There are many security holes in the former, and few in the latter, at least for now.
UPDATE: Fri Nov-26-2004 According to the latest IT news reports, the security situation with MS Internet Explorer version 6 has a new computer worm, Bofra, which infects and spreads to other computers via an unpatched security hole. Time to fire up Firefox!