Book Commercials & Misanthropic Observations

Browser thief

About a month ago, Dave Gunnlaugsson alerted me to a quirk on his internet browser- he was getting “hijacked” every time he would try to check his webmail, and other strange seemingly random times; he would end up on a Google or dell page populated with pay-per click ads.

At the time, I did all I knew how to do- the standard spyware sweep and computer clean up. I never heard if that actually fixed his issue, but the computer that runs weekend worship services started doing the same thing when Michelle Arndt was trying to access her webmail, and to me as I browsed sermonspice.com. So I set about to find more info on how to fix this.

A common thread, I found, is when I type “sermonspice.com” instead of www.sermonspice.com or if any webpage has a link or redirect without the full http://www.

This shouldn’t be a problem; modern browsers are more forgiving with different versions of URL’s than the legacy browsers were - if you didn’t type the URL including the http://www you ended up with an error page. I think this had to do with how web servers and the DNS system used to be set up.

So, what, in this day and age, was the trouble? AUUGH.

The answer turns out to be some vicious little programs with benign names like “URL helper” and “Browser Address Error Redirector” How these got into our computers I do not know- but going into Add/remove programs and removing these turned out to be the answer.

If you are having the same issue, look for these programs to remove:

URL helper
URL Assistant
Browser Address Error Redirector
GoogleAFE