ACE

Hi All,
Can anybody help, searchlight.com keeps on hijacking my searches. Bit by bit it is reducing my access to various websites. What happens is that I type the address I want or click a link from a google page or any web page and it puts itself in front of the address I want (see below)

http://www.searchlight.comhttp://bri...newthread.php?


and redirects the page to searchlight. Once it has done this any further attempts to visit my chosen web address is hijacked, it has now started hijacking links to various threads on this site and I fear that I may soon not be able to visit this site.

Any suggestions will be most gratefully recieved.
I have tried adjusting the settings
Disabling cookies
Disabling activex sripting, plugins etc
I haave evn pit a block on that web address but no dice.

Please, Please, Please help if you can.

Thank you ACE

CrazyCanuck

Sounds like you might have some "spyware" on your computer. The free program I use to rid my computer of this stuff is Ad-Aware, from http://www.lavasoft.de/. I'm sure a lot of the other products are good as well, but I've only used Ad-Aware. It's effective.

seang

another one

http://www.safer-networking.org/index.php?page=spybotsd

failing that may need to edit the registry

ACE

Thanks very much guys, i'll try both.

Is there anyway to prevent this problem from happening again?

Kind Regards
ACE

arlene

ace not appearing to be nasty but many of us are flying soon, there must have been a better way of phrasing what you had to say, after all the latest attacks we are scared enough

arlene

CrazyCanuck

> Is there anyway to prevent this problem from happening again?

First make sure one of these programs makes the problem go away. If you remember how you got hooked up with that annoying problem, then avoid that site again. Otherwise, once Ad-Aware is installed on your computer, it is easy to run again, if need be.

ACE

You are quite right, I'm very sorry I didn't see it that way. The term is used quite often in computing. I am very sorry for any distress I may have caused to anyone, it was thoughtless of me please accept my apologies, I will try and edit the title of the post.

Kind regards
ACE

Nibbs

Ace

You might want to check the registry. Backup the registry before making changes.

Look in

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl

and make sure it hasn't been set to anything unpleasant.

There may be other keys set so if you find a string in that key search the rest of the registry and get shot of it..

Note. Axe, don't want to teach you to suck eggs but the registry is a great place to stuff things up so be careful when deleting values. :lecture:

Jacqui

Crikey, had me worried for a minute too. My husband is in the air on a 747 as I type this, on his way home from a trip back to Blighty. It's bad enough I jump every time the phone rings.......and when he sent me a text message it got the old heart going a bit (he NEVER texts me normally).

unrefined_mind

Hi Ace
I had a similar problem as you on one of our company computers.
If you are still having problems with hijacked homepage, searches etc, Download a small piece of software called CWShredder 1.53

It can be downloaded from
Here

Scroll down to 'Official downloads' section you will find it there, and dont worry - the download is perfectly safe and virus free.

Hope this works
UM

ACE

Thanks Nibbs and UM, will try both as previous advice didn't work.

Even disallowing the URL in the privacy settings didn't work.

If all else fails I thought of using a Java program I wrote at Uni to decipher the flashlightsearch url and writing an access control instruction to deny all transmissions with their ip address. Does this sound feasible?

Thanks guys
ACE

ACE

Hi Nibbs,
I had a look in the registry editor. There are various hexidecimal values in there but I don't really know if there is a problem because I'm not sure what they should be. Any tips?

thanks again
ACE

jib

I had the same problem, with browswer hijackers, to get rid of them download a trial version of Spy Sweeper , very good program.


http://www.webroot.com/wb/products/spysweeper/index.php



jib

ACE

You guys are life savers, thanks for all your suggestions.
Nice one Jib, spy sweeper did the trick.

Now I can get back to looking after my little ones, studying for my finals and doing some serious surfing

Kind Regards
ACE