Yahoo home page hijacked by hotel software

Bruce J Sylvester · December 11th, 2004, 6:21 am

Help please! I recently stayed at a hotel that charges an outrageous daily rate to log into their broadband connection. Okay, so I paid them and used the internet. Now however, I am in a different country and when I bring up Firefox instead of going to Yahoo, I get that same hotel's log in page asking me to pay them some more. If I simply try to go to Yahoo.com I am issued a message "site forbidden."

I tried changing the home page in Firefox options to a different site, google.com but when I bring up the browser it still takes me to the hotel log in page.

I have tried deleting all my cookies, no help.

Any suggestions (besides shooting the jeck at the hotel who hiijacked yahoo and my home page?)

Thanks - Bruce

AmboyGuy · Post by **AmboyGuy** » December 11th, 2004, 6:30 am

Check your proxy settings & task manager for a program that may be routing you to that hotel site (Adware/Spyware type of thing).
ie. Earthlink Accelerator forces you to access the net using their proxy server, and I need to set my access address at localhost:8080.

I dont know if your system can restore to a date previous to your Hotel visit but it might be worth a try.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » December 11th, 2004, 12:39 pm

Dont know whether spyware removers can help you on this one but you could give them a try. These all are very good and very free programs. I've got them all and you can tell I'm a really satisfied client:

Spybot - Search & Destroy 1.3
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html

Ad-Aware SE Personal 1.05
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/support/download/

SpywareBlaster 3.2
http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.html

Hope you'll blast out of the Holiday Prison!

WinLin · Post by **WinLin** » December 11th, 2004, 12:52 pm

Yep, sounds like your browser has been hijacked.
You might want to try "HijackThis". It will show all browser add-ins, start up items, etc. It will give you a list of everything that is starting and running when you use the browser. Search for it on Google, there are a lot of forums and groups that center around it. You can even post your Hijack script to one of the forums and get help on what to remove if you need it.