NTsearch links

okay, what are these NTsearch links doing all over the web? how did they get there? how have they gotten into posts I have made without me doing anything to ask them to be there? and yah. what is this all about? anyone?

Sounds like your computer has been hijacked by spyware. Get AdAware to nuke it.

thanks josh,

so far as I can see, it's a german problem, at least for now--when I did a search for it, all I came up with was german sites.. there are a few fixes written but none for Win98 which is what I'm running :p

the funny thing is, about two minutes after I posted this topic, it went away. *shrug*

I'm still gonna grab AdAware just to be on the safe side.

and now it's back.

pfft.

and AdAware didn't seem to find anything :p

meh. I'll just use Mozilla I guess.

it's weird though, it turns random words in written text into links, for instance the word "search" in my previous post is showing as a link.

gawddamnit.

in case anyone else gets hit...

I used CWShredder from www.spywareinfo.com

it seems to have worked.

yeah, the CoolWebSearch thing takes advantage of a bug in MS's extremely poor implementation of Java in IE. there are a couple of ways to fix this:

1. go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com in IE and download all the critical fixes. do this periodically to make sure that any security holes MS discovers (and believe me, there are a LOT of them) get patched before lots of people exploit them.

2. don't use IE. mozilla offers a few browser options that are pretty good and have a number of useful features relating to popup blocking, image blocking, spam filtering (if you use it for email), and so on. they generally make your computer less susceptible to hacks. if you don't want to use a "non-mainstream" browser, and have plenty of RAM to spend on poor memory management, there's always Netscape, too.

I've been using both Mozilla and IE for awhile now, not sure why both...

it has not so much to do with "non-mainstream"

it has more to do with which icon I happen to click first *shrug*

Spybot Search and Destroy is another good free cleaner, it is often said to be a good compliment to Adaware.

Y'all could just get Apples and Safari. :oD

Pop-up/spyware problem = solved.

or just use mozilla :p