Spyware Warrior

[ROBOCOP]

hi all,a really dumb question,but what is this "about blank" page that comes up now a than?
is this caused by some kind of scumware,spyware?
concerned ,want to know more,any info very welcome.
thanx.

[TeMerc]

About:Blank, or as we affectionately call it A:B, is a variant of the CoolWebSearch Infection(CWSI). Its been around for some time. Not easy to remove tho, it can be done in most all cases.

It is basically a hijacker, to redirect your browser to sites which probably would only get about 2 hits a month. They can then sell advertising based on the 'bloated' number of hits they get.

You can read all about them on Merijn.org. Loads of info there.

Hope that helps.
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[Nick]

There is also the legitimate about:blank when you have your home page set to a blank page. Coolwebsearch utilizes the existing About protocol for displaying blank pages. If you scroll down to the about protocol in the following link, it will tell you alot about how it works. You may want to read the section about the res protocol as well, another one used by CWS.

http://www.microsoft.com/mind/0199/cutting/cutting0199.asp
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[ROBOCOP]

hi guys! thanx for the info,am now fairly sure that my "about blank"
was a pucca one and not cws related!
have had this once in the last year or so.
thanx once again
by the way while im here,is this corect that spyware guard does not need updating very often?saw this on another post here,but i have to say it does seem to have been a long time since any updates have been added,icheck once every week or so but still says i have the latest spywareguard definitions.

[Bjerrk]

yeah you're right...
Sometimes it'll be months between the spywareguard-updates.
But you never know when they arrive

-Bjerrk