'Gaping hole' lets hackers into Windows

[Vin DSL]

Has YOUR Internet Explorer been acting screwy the last few days?

Computer users have been warned to avoid using Internet Explorer until a gaping hole in the browser's security is fixed by Microsoft.

The loophole, created by hackers, lets criminals take control of a PC...

http://www.thisislondon.com/news/art...4?source=Metro

Here's the cure for forcible hijacking:

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/

[Spathiphyllum]

And Opera.

[lokki]

spiffy

I'm just so used to running IE that I forget I have Firefox installed... gotta retrain myself!

[Vin DSL]

My wife uses IE, and when I run Ad-aware on her machine, it's detecting hijackings up the ying-yang. She's the one that clued me into her browser acting weird. For instance, she doesn't run a browser 'home page' - just 'blank.' However, for the last week or two, her browser keeps changing to MSN. She thought I was doing it, and didn't say anything (smart girl ).

Anyway, Mozilla/Firefox is immune to this nonsense...

[Spathiphyllum]

Originally posted by Vin DSL
My wife uses IE...

And you let her? Vin, show some compassion!

[tuxxer]

Originally posted by Vin DSL
Has YOUR Internet Explorer been acting screwy the last few days?

Oh great, why does the word paladium come to mind.

Tux

[Spathiphyllum]

Originally posted by Vin DSL
...I run Ad-aware...her browser keeps changing to MSN

This sounds like an OS permutation of the Alexa search extension with a more insidious twist:

Alexa key:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software\microsof t\internet explorer\extensions\{c95fe080-8f5d-11d2-a20b-00aa003c157a}\

Now that the OS is so integrated with IE, "funny" stuff happening with an auto-refresh feature in the default settings of the browser extend themselves to OS functionality. Just speculating.

New content added by Spathiphyllum after visiting the Wayback Machine

"How can I get my site included in the Archive?

Alexa Internet has been crawling the web since 1996, which has resulted in a massive archive. If you have a web site, and you would like to ensure that it is saved for posterity in the Internet Archive, and you've searched wayback and found no results, you can visit the Alexa's "Webmasters" page at http://pages.alexa.com/help/webmaste...ml#crawl_site.

Method 2: if you have the Alexa tool bar installed, just visit a site.

Method 3: while visiting a site, use the 'show related links' in Internet Explorer, which uses the Alexa service."

I'd be curious to know how many people were aware of the ease in which Microsoft could track your every public access by your individual IP address (and possibly MAC)?

[lokki]

I've been pretty lucky - I run Ad-Aware once per week, and rarely get anything at all. Usually, it's some ineffective dialer (I have DSL).

But, I'm also using a pretty large HOSTS file, and don't really hit too many different sites. I'm almost never on things like eBay, Amazon, or any of the major media outlets. The vast majority of my spam seems to be the scattergun stuff, as it hits all my domain accounts equally, even the ones I've never given out, but have reserved for future use.

<shrug>

[Joshua Clinard]

I'm sorry to have to bring this up, but Firefox 9.0 is NOT immune to broswer hijackings. I run it about half of the time when I surf, and for the past few days is has been resetting my start page to some search site. It's not coolwebsearch, and adaware can't find it, so I haven't been able to remove it yet. Also, the browser keeps shutting down for no reason, and sometimes, when I type in a URL that doesn't exist in the zone, it redirects to that search page.

[CeleronXL]

Originally posted by Joshua Clinard
I'm sorry to have to bring this up, but Firefox 9.0 is NOT immune to broswer hijackings. I run it about half of the time when I surf, and for the past few days is has been resetting my start page to some search site. It's not coolwebsearch, and adaware can't find it, so I haven't been able to remove it yet. Also, the browser keeps shutting down for no reason, and sometimes, when I type in a URL that doesn't exist in the zone, it redirects to that search page.

The only way to hijack Firefox is if you allow it to install that one single Mozilla spyware app that is currently out there. You are always prompted before this installs, too. I'd hardly call that a hijack. Anyway, if you're having problems with it, simply back up your bookmarks.html, cookies.txt, and signons.txt files from your profile, nuke the profile, and make a new one. Problem solved.