How to recover a Hijacked Web Browser.

There are quite a lot of nasty little hijackers that are just waiting to jump into your PC and hold you hostage, while they dictate where you go and what you see in your web browser, then if you want to get rid of them, they demand money from you, only to re-appear later on.

Here in Australia, we are not immune to this, but if you want to get rid of these problems, you generally have to pay someone to do it for you. Depending on their competence, you are either going to end up with

1: a clean install on your Hard Drive, meaning that you have lost all of your data, or find it dumped into a folder called Old-Data, that you have to decipher and re-arrange. This will cost you anything starting from around $150

2: a competent technician that has removed the hijacker and you still have all your data, programs and bookmarks, with a safe and simple AntiVirus program to stop this happening again. This will cost you anything starting from about $75 (if I was your Technician) up to $150

I have been removing viruses and trojans from computers for nearly 20 years now, going way back to the 90's with the 'Anna Kournikova nude' virus, and watched them become more complex and invasive. But regardless how they get in or how annoying they may get, they can always be removed. That is where I specialise.

The browser hijacker (which is really a trojan, invading your computer from within a seemingly innocent file that has been downloaded) is not really interested in causing any malicious damage to your computer or information, it is specifically designed to make money. Unfortunately, anything of value will be exploited and become corrupted. So the makers of these trojans use these pop-ups and hijackers to collect information about you, which is sent back to companies that want to target you for specific advertising and spam mail, in an effort to extract even more money from you.

Removing the Hijacker.

The best solution is to just disable and then remove the hijacker. Of course you could wipe all the data on your Hard Drive and start with a clean install, then load all your programs back on and reload all your data from backups, (did I hear "I don't have any backups..") but that could take several hours, or even days...

So follow these steps, that will allow you to remove MOST hijackers that you will come across.

1. The first thing you need to do is download the following products:

Norton Power Eraser, from: http://liveupdate.symantec.com/upgrade/NPE/1033/NPE.exe

and Spybot Search and Destroy, from: http://www.safer-networking.org/spybot2-own-mirror-1/

2. Then you need to run Norton Power eraser. It will run through and then restart your computer. but follow the prompts until it has finished and restarted again. you could try running it again just to be sure that there is nothing left on your system.

3. Then once you have finished with Norton, run Spybot Search and destroy and update it and then do a full system scan and let it clean up anything it finds.

4. The next step is to go to the start menu where your shortcut link for your browser is (Chrome, Firefox, etc.) and right-click the link, select "properties" then click the "Shortcut" tab and in the 'Target' window, it will have the location of the file to open, in quotation marks. all it should contain is the target for the file, in quotation marks. It probably has something like www.safernetwork.crap/blah/blah after it. delete it.

The Target should look like this:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe"

5. Now open Internet Explorer properties in the control panel and set the home page to google.com (or what ever you prefer), then open your browser and make sure that the start-page is the same as what you have set in Internet Properties.

6. Finaly, restart your computer again, once you have gone through and cleaned up your browser links and see if that has worked. You should have a nice, clean browser once again and saved hundreds of dollars and many heartbreaking hours of work.