My home computer is back in the shop.

It seems to have picked up a "browser hijacker" somewhere. A very specific one - it affects Google and Yahoo searches (but not Altavista) in Firefox and IE (I was not driven enough to try to download and apply some other browser; Firefox is my favorite and though I could probably learn to tolerate another browser, most pages seem to look good in Firefox).

What the hijacker does, is when you search - say, Ezekiel Chapter 11 commentary which is what I was doing my Sunday School lesson on - instead of taking you to whatever site comes up (say, "biblegateway.com"), it takes you to a "shopping" site.

Offering "Great Deals on %whatyousearchedfor% clothes" (so: "Great Deals on Ezekiel Clothes!")

Lovely.

I think that the %expletiveadjective% hackers need to have an%expletiveadverbing% %expletiveverb% done to their %expletiveadjective% %expletivebodypart%.


Because such things worry me - might there not be a keystroke logger attached? Might not this be an open portal through which other Bad Things might come? - I tried to remove it.

Man, how I tried. Reran McAfee, with it set to the highest protection level. Downloaded Spybot Search and Destroy after deciding my existing anti-spyware wasn't finding it. Ran Spybot followed by MalwareBytes several times.

Nothing.

Tried downloading HiJack This, looked at the logs, and realized even with the online cheat sheet explaining some of them, I was out of my depth and in danger of deleting something the computer would actually need to run.

Then, trying to do one last check (having prayed my last run of the anti-bad-stuff programs had done something), I could not even get Firefox to open.

So I took it back to the friendly computer guys and conceded defeat. They think they know what it is; I hope they do.

I'll be politer on here than I was on Ravelry but I'll say that I wish the guys who wrote these programs would get sent to a deserted island without Internet access. I mean, seriously. This kind of thing makes me irrationally angry, just like vandalism does. It wastes time and money for people, it causes frustration and agony, and (apparently) in many cases, it's done simply for the "lulz" (which seems to be hacker-speak for "My friends and I feed on the misery of others! So we spread misery, and then we laugh!")

Honestly, if these people used their powers for Good - if they worked, say, in the ciphers department of the State Department, or if they worked with a software company to figure out and fix security breaches, they could probably make lots of money. Because that kind of junk takes skill.

But some people just can't use their powers for Good, I guess. So the rest of us have to Deal. (I had this high-speed connection for nearly 2 years, nary a problem. Now I've been hit twice in two months. It's very frustrating.)