[kghoscht]

Hi folks, I've just wrestled (and won!) with a particularly nasty popup/IE hijacker. I haven't read anything here on this, so I figured I'd post a little FYI incase some other poor monkey has the same problems.

I was getting browser popups (as opposed to messenger windows) randomly, sometimes from sites that I know don't have any popups. Worse, I'd get the damned things even when IE wasn't running!

AdAware and Spybot couldn't fix the problem, neither could the two virus scanners I tried.

Eventually I used another app which lead me to find a program called syslaunch.exe sitting all by itself in my /Program Files directory. I deleted this and all has been well.

edit: Oh yeah, the app was called HijackThis. It'll give you a report and you can check out what it finds. If I find anything suspicious, I google it and see what it does, then act accordingly. I think www.spywareinfo.com has a place where you can post HijackThis logs, and the forum members there will help you out.

 

[Ian F]

Any ideas on stopping those damned Save.com pop-ups?

I really hate the one that pops up on the bottom of the screen and you can't right-click to get rid of it...

You have to wonder? How stupid are these people? When your ad is so frickin' annoying and persistant do you really think anyone will buy something from you?

Save.com can go 'eff-themselves as far as I'm concerned. :angry:

 

[Tenchiro]

Pop-Up Stopper from http://www.panicware.com/ has been good for me at dealing with the random ads.

 

[Silver]

Use Mozilla or Thunderbird.

Or the google toolbar, that works well for standard web popups.

 

[goosemagoo]

what's a popup?

I haven't seen one in months. I use a browser called netcaptor. I think the new mozilla browser is very similar plus once you use a tabbed browser you won't ever go back.

 

[Ridemonkey]

Google toolbar works pretty well for pop-ups. Mozilla Firebird is pretty slick too. Spyware is a biatch though - not to mention XP home edition comes with built in spyware. Fockers.... :angry:

 

[Tenchiro]

Originally posted by Silver
Use Mozilla or Thunderbird.

Or the google toolbar, that works well for standard web popups.

The Google Toolbar is almost spyware in and of itself. Although they are very forthcoming in their privacy policy about their data mining practices.

Google's Privacy Policy

Google may share information about you with advertisers, business partners, sponsors, and other third parties. However, we only divulge aggregate information about our users and will not share personally identifiable information with any third party without your express consent. For example, we may disclose how frequently the average Google user visits Google, or which other query words are most often used with the query word "Linux." Please be aware, however, that we will release specific personal information about you if required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order.

 

[kghoscht]

Originally posted by Ian F

You have to wonder? How stupid are these people? When your ad is so frickin' annoying and persistant do you really think anyone will buy something from you?

Save.com can go 'eff-themselves as far as I'm concerned. :angry:

Bwahahaha....

I was going to reply and post an URL to a site which was all about helping people CREATE unstoppable popups!

It was all about "Popup blockers are stealing from your customer base and denying your right to reach your potential customers!!"

^%@$&!!!!

Anyways, I just checked, and this site is gone!

SCORE!!!

 

[kghoscht]

Originally posted by Ridemonkey
Google toolbar works pretty well for pop-ups. Mozilla Firebird is pretty slick too. Spyware is a biatch though - not to mention XP home edition comes with built in spyware. Fockers.... :angry:

Yeah, I use Mozilla on my office computer (leeenuks) and on my gf's computer, which unfortunately runs WinXP Home....

Worse, it's a Dell computer, so on top of your usual XP Home madness (sadness?) there's Dell's spyware installed too!