The Hijacked Explorer, Part I
by Andy Turudic
Back in the good old days at 2400 baud, we had some community rules that were to be respected, and anyone that abused his or her privileges in the community was chastised severely by its other members. One of those rules, of the Arpanet community we now call the Internet, was that no commercial traffic or postings were allowed. Since the original net was primarily used by academics and government technologists, we recognized that a freely-accessed community facility, with members numbering in the tens of thousands, was a nothing-to-lose proposition for any commercial interest targeting this demographic. Though we were not entirely devoid of what was eventually known to be "spam," the source node and user could be identified and appropriately dealt with, including suspension of accounts. The value of the net in moving files between computers was such that no user, institution, or corporation could afford to be blacklisted from access.
The HTML-based Internet of today runs on a different set of rules, unfortunately sinking to the lowest common denominator instead of settling for a threshold of decency and friendly rules. For less than $10, any chimp can obtain a URL and set up shop for a year. With over 8 billion web pages the quandary presenting itself to a ruthless commercial interest is how to bring its male endowment enhancer, or other silly scam, fraud, or useless information, to the forefront of awareness. Websites and pages with class and self control, like analogZONE, use either a small banner or "postage stamp" ads that can be clicked for further information if there's interest. These ads don't get in the way of the surfer's train of thought, are respected, and are noticed…
Perhaps a lack of marketing knowledge, human thought processes, lame or fraudulent product lines, or maybe brand-marketing guerilla tactics taken from an airport-bought textbook, has generated new schemes for flakey-product pushing, the most notorious being popup ads and the "popunder" from companies like Undertone Networks. For some reason Undertone and their ilk have convinced themselves that a prospective customer would happily come to their advertisers' site, after having been informed of the wondrous concept of getting DVDs in the mail every week, during the period when a surfer doesn't want to surf anymore. Instead of generating a sale, the irritated surfer goes off and invests in, or downloads, popup/under blocking software. Not only does this stifle a marketing trick, it also cripples legitimate sites that use popups to fill in forms or provide glossaries and supplementary sidebar information that has been requested by a visitor.
Other web page schemes, most notably on the larger news media sites, have recently engaged in tactics like redirecting to an ad page, timing out after a few seconds, and then going to the intended page. While sitting there waiting for the information that was originally desired, the surfer is expected to drop their train of thought, and click into a rabbit hole of supposedly-enchanting Internet wonders. Instead of following the rabbit, surfers, looking at their own watches, instead make a mental note to avoid the website in favor of alternative sites that do not have such time-wasting rubbish. Since many of these sites get paid on "click-throughs," creative desperation for click-through revenue is now resulting in semi-transparent or opaque ads placed over the text the surfer wants to read, or forcing the surfer to click on the ad, or do a "mouse-over" in order to reveal the partially-covered article. Do they expect the surfer to return again? They likely will not if there's another choice, and definitely will not for a useless or lame product offering.
These methods of trying to obtain revenues by click-throughs, in retrospect, are relatively harmless or small nuisances, at best. There is now a huge looming threat to the Internet, and to Microsoft itself, with the security holes that have been revealed in its web browser, Internet Explorer (IE). Web page hijacking is a fairly recent phenomenon and is among the most malevolent of security, and machine integrity, threats to Internet users. So much so that a substantial number of frustrated surfers, including myself very recently, have given up and moved over to Mozilla's Firefox browser, which is faster and actually preserves the user's bookmarks on installation. In fact Firefox is becoming so popular that there is fear of a tsunami of threats in the safe harbor its users now enjoy.
Please join me next time as I recount my struggle with successfully removing
an IE web page hijacker.
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