Dwight Watt - Newspaper Article #101 4/27/2011

A virus that is a hijacker is a virus that controls other programs on your computer.

The hijacker takes control of various programs or links on your computer, usually your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc) and instead of going where you want goes where it wants

The hijacker will send you to sites that either have material that you do not want to see, porn, drug ads, etc. or to different sites that want you to buy programs that will supposedly fix the infection on your machine. Basically your Internet connectivity becomes worthless as you cannot do what you want to do.

Having anti-virus software and anti-spyware software on your computer are good ways to help prevent these from getting on your machine. If they get on your machine try booting to safe mode in Windows (press the F5 key repetitively when starting the machine and choose Safe Mode) and run a full scan with your anti-malware software.

If you do not have anti-malware software on your computer go to another machine and download the portable version of Superantispyware.com on a thumb/usb drive and then run that program from the thumb/usb drive thru Computer/My Computer. It is not as complete of cleaning but will get big things.

After that basic cleaning then start normal and update your anti-malware (or install and update) and run full scans. You may also need to run a registry cleaner to clean damage done by the hijacker. Ccleaner.com is a good free registry cleaner I use.