sharewareisland browser hijack

This website has some nice utilities. But they have some attrocious policies. One of them is if you use any of the software they distribute then you must allow then to hijack your browser start page.

If you lock down the home page, they undo the block, intefering with your network security. The hijack also removes any other start pages you may have.

I've tried the lock down of the start page via a registry hack that I found, but as I said, it doesn't stop the hijack.

Apart from bannin g my son from using the keyboard utility for his online game, is there any other way to prevent these malicious people from hijacking the browser?

thanks
Tanya

HammerHead said:

"Apart from bannin g my son from using the keyboard utility for his online game, is there any other way to prevent these malicious people from hijacking the browser?
"

The solution is obvious don't go there.

Gosh I wish I'd thought of that

He's not visiting the site. The program is a legitemate keyboard shortcut program for Runescape. However, anything distributed from the website interferes with the browser settings.

I should have said "malicious software".

"... legitimate keyboard shortcut program...". Really? I wouldn't run it.

There's all kinds of software out there that comes as an installer. During the install process, the user is prompted with optional "extras" throughout the install and most are set as default. If you click through the install without reading it carefully, you could end up with all sorts of unwanted software. EyeCandy is one developer of this method. You might try un-installing the software and install with caution. If it still loads a "Browser Helper Object", I'd scrap it for sure.

Make your own keyboard shortcuts.

carwiz said:

"... legitimate keyboard shortcut program...". Really? I wouldn't run it.

There's all kinds of software out there that comes as an installer. During the install process, the user is prompted with optional "extras" throughout the install and most are set as default. If you click through the install without reading it carefully, you could end up with all sorts of unwanted software. EyeCandy is one developer of this method. You might try un-installing the software and install with caution. If it still loads a "Browser Helper Object", I'd scrap it for sure.

Make your own keyboard shortcuts.

Thanks for your reply. THis is not something that was installed by an installer. It's not installing anything other than the keyboard manager for Runescape. This is quite a popular program from what I can tell. It happens whenever you run the program.

Runscape has some rather slow, mundane mouse and keyboard sequences to accomplish simple tasks. This utility is a huge timesaver and takes away the frustration of having to do half a dozen clicks with one keystroke.

There are no BHOs installed, at least not that I can find.

There are no options in the installed to select or deselect anything. Basically the installer is a licence terms and a drive/path, that's it.

nvm.

I just thought of a work around.

I can create a task in task scheduler to run every 5 minutes that applies a registry patch to reset the homepage to the server we use here. Silly solution, but if the only other option is to stop using the software then I'll have to do this..

thanks

Tanyam said:

Apart from banning my son from using the keyboard utility for his online game, is there any other way to prevent these malicious people from hijacking the browser?

thanks
Tanya

Yep. Sure is. gpedit.msc. (User Configuration, administrative templates, windows components, Internet explorer).

Enable the "Disable changing home page settings" and specify the home page to be used.

Found this quite by accident. Seems to stop them dead in their track so far.