Expert: Carolyn Meinel - 6/1/2004

Question
Dear sir,

I am using Explorer as my browser and the trouble is since yesterday it got changged to C:\WINNT\system32\hp.uti. I cannot change to my default webpage. Any help on this?

Thanks

Answer
You have what appears to be a really unusual case of infection by adware or spyware. I found one case where someone had a similar problem recently, check out this URL:

http://computercops.biz/postt45494.html

The victim of this attack had used ad-aware unsuccessfully. To be honest, the solution at this site looks really difficult and I can't guarantee that it will work.

Here are other ideas on what you could do. Perhaps Spybot from http://www.safer-networking.org could clean out the attacker. Be sure to run the update engine as this is probably a really new attack.

If this doesn't work, another solution is to use a better browser. These trojans/adware/spyware type programs often use ActiveX, which only runs on Explorer. Free browsers that don't use ActiveX are Mozilla and Firebird from Mozilla.org and Opera from Opera.org. They are better than Explorer, anyhow, IMHO.