home | about | newsletters | contact | advertising | Shop | radio | membership | site map

Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle

Free and Premium. Why Register?

Login: Password: Remember me

Use CWShredder to Help Against Spyware

Posted Oct 25, 2004 by David Risley  

Not too long ago, I had to take several hours out of my date to rescue Internet Explorer from the clurtches of spyware. My homepage had been hihacked, my error pages re-routed to search engines, and even the most friendly of sites were loading me up with popup ads. Since this experience, I have since decided to make the move to Firefox, but there are still things that can be done to help rescue IE. One of them is CWShredder.

CWShredder is a small utility for removing CoolWebSearch (aka CoolWwwSearch, YouFindAll, White-Pages.ws and a dozen other names). More information on the CWS hijacker can be found at http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/cwschronicles.html. CWShredder will find and destroy all traces of the CoolWebSearch (CWS) hijacker on your system. This includes:

  • Redirections to CoolWebSearch related pages
  • Redirections when mistyping URLs
  • Redirections when visiting Google
  • Enormous IE slowdowns when typing
  • IE start page/search page changing on reboot
  • Sites in the IE Trusted Zone you didn’t add
  • Popups in Google and Yahoo when searching
  • Errors at startup mentioning WIN.INI or IEDLL.EXE
  • Unable to change or see certain items in IE Options
  • Unable to access IE Options at all

There are many places where you can download this utility, but MajorGeeks (http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4086.html) is one of them. The utility was developed in the Netherlands, but was recently acquired by InterMute. You can view the press release here.

Fire Your Computer Guy!

A computer technician spills the beans and makes available the knowledge he has charged clients hundreds in service fees for. It is Computer Secrets Unleashed. Find Out More.

About the Author

David Risley is the founder of PCMech.com. He is the brains, the thinker, the writer, the nerd.
David's Website
David on Twitter
David on FriendFeed

Free Weekly Newsletter

Name:
Email:
 

Featured Product of The Week

Getting Started with Ubuntu Linux

Getting Started with Ubuntu Linux

Now Playing on PCMech Video

Feature ImageGoogle Chrome (Video)

Feature ImageHow-To: Mass Rename Files in Windows XP/Vista

See All Videos | PCMech Channel Youtube Channel