Homepage Settings.

This evening I had a problem previously encountered whereby my homepage had been changed and the settings boxes were all greyed out.

Does anybody know the correct procedure for locking it so it cannot be changed by VBS, Active X, or whatever these people use to initiate this ?

I should add that on this occasion I was able to restore my pc by using scanreg / restore and luckily this was successful.

As I am on ADSL I know people always recommend using a firewall however I used ZA while on dial up and it simply paralysed my system - every request of software trying to access the internet or report of a port scan locked up the pc requiring a reboot, only for the same thing to happen everytime thereafter. Therefore I have been reluctant to use this again. I do have PC Door Guard Anti Trojan Software, and run ANG 6.0 right from boot sector virus check.

It is not urgent that I get a reply as I have rectified it myself but tips on locking a homepage may be beneficial to a number of users on these forums. I was told before that it can be done through Regedit - H/KEY Users or something like that.


Any suggestions would be most welcome.


KMIELKE123.

How to prevent this in the future?
http://www.pjwalczak.com/spguard/index.php
What happened? What can be done?
Well supposedly IE6 SP1 will ask you if you want this to occur.
Also
http://www.spywareinfo.com/hijacked.html
http://www.generation.net/~hleboeuf/iehome.htm
http://www.mvps.org/inetexplorer/Darnit.htm#Home_Page
(see the second subject in the blue area about 10% of the way down)

As you are on a high speed connection, you should be using some sort of firewall.

I would give Zone Alarm another try but if you would rather use something else, try Tiny Software or Sygate Personal Firewall. All of these are better than having nothing to protect you, and they are all free for personal use.

Doc

Sorry for the dlay in reposting I was not online yesterday.

Thanks for the above supplied links I will certaibly take a look at them as soon as possible.

Regards how this occured - I clicked on a site in Google but as soon as it loaded I was redirected into one of these sites where popups open up as fast as you close them.

Using Ctrl Alt Del made it possible to close the popups,

However I was then presented with a Microsoft Certificate Approved Download offer - presumably a Dialer. I stopped this.

Luckily I had already followed the advice of a poster on this forum and had disabled Install on Demand in IE 6 Options Tools. This alone has saved me at least 8 times from things liike Gator.

Finally as stated I checked my homepage 'on the off chance' and sure enough it was now locked to this same site and continuously tried to send me this dialer.

As a last resort I ran Scanreg / Restore selected an earlier successful boot .cab and restarted. Homepage was restored to BT as before. Ran Adaware ( another thing obtained via this forum.)

Everything back to normal.


Thanks again to all posters.


KMIELKE123

KMIELKE123 - Did you install StartPageGuard?

Been using that one for years and haven't ever had a problem (it's freeware, too!).

Should you run into something SPG won't handle, give Javacool's Browser Hijack Blaster program a look here

It's a little more informative than SPG, checks/alerts for BHO's trying to load, runs in SYSTRAY (very low memory/processor usage).

It's also freeware! HTH Pete

Thanks for the above link.

Could not post reply earlier as my Broadband connection was down - BT claimed it was related to the storms on Sunday even though it only went down 1:30 AM today.

Anyway I did d/l SPG some time ago - the last time my homepage was hijacked. However as result of a redirect from the SPG site my h/p was changed again to something called Freshstations.com I therefore deleted SPG assuming it to be something else malicious.

I did however d/l and install the other homepage protection that you advised my about and have it running.


Thanks again to all posters.



KMIELKE123