I believe most of us, one time or another, had our web browser’s home page hijacked. That is, when we launch our web browser such as Internet Explorer (IE) it shows a different site from the default website or the site which we had set.

Previously, a spam website can do this is by changing your homepage setting in your IE. This is not permanent and users can easily change the casino or porn websites back to the desired site manually.

However, now spammers have resorted to sending .all files into our computer without ours and our web browsers’ acknowledgement (even if you have ActiveX disabled). Those .dll files will manipulate the registry and change the web browsers’ registries every time the computer starts, resulting in a homepage that is assigned by the spammer. And your search engine is also linked to their search page which is often the spammers’ websites.

It requires expertise to remove those .dll files. Changing the registry wouldn’t help as it would go back to the same thing every time you restart your computer. Spam removal software such as Ad-aware will also not be able to detect or remove those files.

One software (free) which can effectively evict those malicious browser-hijacking files is HijackThis, if used carefully. If your start and search pages keep getting switched, HijackThis can automate the process of resetting them.

Clicking its Scan button will list out the way your internet configuration has departed from the standard Windows setup - altered registry entries, new IE toolbars, downloaded ActiveX objects, etc.

Select each item on the list that you do not understand or recognise, then click “Info” to get more details before doing anything. Once you’ve found the suspicious entries, proceed carefully. Fix only a few of them at a time, then open your browser to see if it’s back to normal and reboot to see if the fix holds.

Remember to use HijackThis’ backup feature, just in case.