Internet Options Hijacked

[David]

Using XP Pro, IE6

Last night i picked up some sort of trip that has hijacked my Internet options. I am unable to get i through Tools > Internet Options.. I get a mesage that says to contact Admin.. I am Admin..I can get in through Control Panel but can not change my home page.

I ran Search and Destroy that found some yourfavoritesearch and coolwwwpages crap which i removed and that reset everything to it's default settings. But i still don't have access via Internet Options in IE6 and when i go through Control Panel i have access to everything else but my homepage settings.

Please help....

[thoriphes]

Ok...what was the most recent thing you downloaded/opened/ran_for_the_first_time/etc?

(this is usually my first question for tech support for potential virii)

[David]

Sorry for the late reply.

I downloaded nothing. I went to a site that spawned about 10 or more popups that spawned even more as i closed them off.

After i managed to get rid of them all i noticed my homepage had been changed to yourfavoritesearch.com (don't go there). From then on i was unable to change anything. As i said i ran Search and destroy that seemed to reset everything to default settings, but i still cant get into Internet Opt. via IE6, but can through Control Panel. I can change anything except home page setting.

[DDD]

your avatar is scary man.....Have you tried a restore point if you are running XP? Not to big on cpu repair just thought I would chime in

[David]

Well i think a reformat is on the cards if i cant find a quick fix, but thanks for the input........

[thoriphes]

Ok, David. Obviously, it was that site that changed your homepage. Also, it may have ran a rogue script on your computer amidst all the pop-ups. What I would suggest you do is first go to Microsoft's Update site (http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/en/default.asp) and download all the critical updates. This may fix an exploitation in IE6 that you may not have patched yet.

After doing that, see if you can access your options. If not, then it's time to run IE6's repair...

Go to microsoft's site and look for the IE6 installer. Run it. It will see that you already have IE installed and it should ask if you want to repair it. I would be very surprised if they didn't have that option.

If that doesn't work out for you, then swiftly run a virus scanner through your system looking for everything and anything.

[David]

Thanks Thor, i'll give it a go tonight.....

[prstudio]

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=216583


there are also other registry values you can set, for instance i have it to where no one can change my start page- that link should fix you up; what happened is that the spyware or site you accessed, ran a script that edited your reg values, like the "key" or placeholder for your start page got changed to their website, then they set it to where you couldn't change it back.

Registry Spelunking...it's the best.

***NOTE
On winxp, if browsing to the registry location in that article doesn't work, look for this location

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\CURR ENTVERSION\INTERNET SETTINGS

That should be more than enough info to fix your problem...the critical updates will help to stop the problem from happening again, however the catalyst to the problem was the script running off the server you connected to.

[David]

Thanks pr. I'm going to just reformat.

Also when i go online i'm bombarded with popups every where. When not online it's always trying to connect to some 10k.org..
Thanks anyway, i've saved this thread for future reference though. Let's hope this doesn't happen again.

Dave

[Makaveli]

perhaps you should invest in either a popup blocker or a better browser than IE :P

and no, i'm NOT talking about nutscrape :P

[prstudio]

the popups are spyware, either installed programs, or ambiguous files ran by scripting...

adaware

and spybot

would take care of those...pop up blockers work too

but get the source of the problem...

also try to avoid the kind of sites spyware is usually found at