AboutCarolyn Meinel Expertise I cover Windows, Unix, TCP/IP and Ethernet security questions. I do not cover Mac, Palm Pilot, or other networking issues.
Experience Books by Carolyn Meinel: wrote a chapter for The Hacking of America book (see http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567204600/happyhacker)
My article Code Red for the Web for Scientific American was reprinted in the book Best American Science Writing 2002 (see http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060936509/happyhacker). My book The Happy Hacker: A Guide to Mostly Harmless Hacking is now in 4th edition with a Japanese edition (see http://happyhacker.org/hhbook/).
Question Dear sir,
when i connect to internet, internet explorer is automatically opening with www.newtop5.com site. Can you please help regarding this issue
Answer It sounds like your computer has been infected with adware. I checked out tht site, newtop5.com, and it is getting a tremendous amount of traffic, among the top 5,000 most visited websites in the world. So since it doesn't have anything worth viewing, the owners may well be getting traffic from hijacked browsers like yours.
The best solution is to install a complete Internet security suite which will protect against adware. You can get a free 30 day trial of one of these products at http://kapersky.com, or F-Secure's Complete Internet security suite, which offers a free thirty day trial: https://store.f-secure.com/cgi-bin/dlreg/ml=EN?ID=FSISTB&desid=TRIAL
If this doesn't work, look for a file named "hosts," which usually will be in c:\i386 depending upon your operating system. Open this file in Notepad. It should look something like this:
# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host
127.0.0.1 localhost
Your browser ignores any line in this file that begins with #. What you want to look for is anything else. The numerical address for www.newtop5.com is 94.75.203.132. So if you see that number in your hosts file without the # in front of it, that is what is hijacking your browser. So just delete that line and make sure you just click "save" to save the hosts file without Notepad turning it into a file named hosts.txt.
