Squire Search - "new" browser hijacker?

e-nation

my computer illiterate friend apparently zigged when he shoulda zagged and ended up w/ some whacky ad-ware which hijacked his browser, and i had a helluva time.. actually gave up on trying to get it off of there for him until i had some time to do some research.

on his system, i ran ad-aware, and AVG (which was recognizing the stuff as a "Trojan Horse").

ad-aware found the components, but couldn't remove them... apparently due to it's interaction w/ IE.

i considered re-booting to DOS prompt and just removing the mailicious directories that way before XP had a chance to start, but we had no floppies on hand. (ah, the non-technical, everyday user! is ignorance really bliss?)

blah, blah...
if you encounter something called SquireSearch or Squire, or Xupiter, check this out... it might save you some grief! as of this post, they had last updated info about this on 03/09/04
http://www.pestpatrol.com/pestinfo/x/xupiter.asp

drowd

i am not familiar with squire search, but i have spent a fair amount of time dealing with Xupitor, and i dont understand how it isnt illegal. anyway, thanks for the heads up about squire . . .

versello

I find that after running a thorough Ad-Aware scan, running Spybot Search & Destroy afterwards will eliminate prolly 90% of spyware.

e-nation

thanks for the tip about spy bot!

stoopid

Find "hijackthis" and remove the unwanted critters manually from the registry (just be sure not to delete something you need!).