Preventing Hijacked Favorites and Home Page

I want to know how to prevent web sites from altering my favorites list and home page. (I have no trouble restoring my old settings.) My Zone Alarm firewall fails here. Is there some security setting in Internet Explorer that will prevent this from happening?

 

Hello aruzinsky,

This is happening through the Browser, don't blame the Firewall - beyond what it was designed to do meaning that when you're "browsing ", its "voluntary" and firewalls were designed to deal with uninvited attempts at your system. If you want to know what firewalls do and generally how: http://www.howstuffworks.com/firewall.htm

Read this article on Browser secuity http://www.windows-help.net/features/surf-safe.html

If it continues to happen, post back.

In the meantime, download SpyBot from here http://tomcoyote.org/SPYBOT/ Read the tutorial, IMPORTANT that you do so. Chances are you have the malware on your system.

Regards - Charles

 

aruzinsky--Specific to preventing a homepage hijack, consider using SpywareGuard
http://www.wilderssecurity.net/spywareguard.html
and perhaps SpywareBlaster
http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.html
After you have been hijacked scan with HiJackThis
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/
You should also have a spyware detector program like AdAware
http://www.lavasoft.de/support/download/ or
SpybotS&D
http://security.kolla.de/

 

Open regedit and navigate to the following key.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Control Panel]

Look in the right pane for a value named Homepage. Right click on it and choose modify. Change the zero to a 1. If you don't have the hompage value you can add it by right clicking in the right pane and choosing new> DWORD Value. Name it Homepage then right click on it, choose modify and again, change the zero to a 1. This will prevent your homepage from being changed. After doing this the option to change your homepage will be greyed out in IE's options. If you ever want to change your homepage You'll have to go back and change the 1 to a zero.

 

Zander--If there is spyware/malware on the hard drive, which is capable of changing the homepage, it will just change things back even after making the Registry modification you suggest. It will be necessary to detect and delete the malware first.

 

Go here and get the Iespyads.Zip file. The REG file included will put a number if sites known to do this into the Restricted Sites Zone of IE, preventing them from doing this. Follow the instructions concerning changing the setting of the zone by going down the line and set to Disable or High everything, set password to prompt.
This has a side affect of blocking their cookies, also.
This would not affect any malware already on the system.
Or, since you know what the sites are, you can put them into the Restricted yourself, if the address is blah.malware.com, put the site in as *.malware.com, the * is a wildcard. However, with this method, the site could have been put there by another keeping you from actually putting in the real offending site.

 

"Read this article on Browser secuity "
Thats a greate article, take it one step further
>,tools internet options >security>
Highlight the trusted zone and set it to the same setting as
the article recommends.

then in the restriced zone disable everything.

also check tools ie options > content > pubishers and if there are any there remove them, besides Microsoft that is.
Lonny

 

aruzinsky--So?

 

Sorry for the delay. It takes time to test security settings by visiting suspicious web sites. I had the "High" security setting, but I had to change back to medium to use one web site that I visit regularly (it was my old home page). Anyway, somewhere I had my homepage hyjacked again in a more invasive manner than previously so I had to remove it with Hijack This. Anyway, it will take me a long time to sort out whence this happened.

Thank you all for your input.

I am very curious to know the big picture here. Why isn't there a law against this? Why don't philanthropic hackers attack the web sites that do this? I certainly wouldn't convict them if I was on a jury.