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IEEE Computer Society
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How To Remove About:Blank Home Page Hijackers
About:Blank hijackings are usually caused by spyware browser hijackers and may also involve download trojans, backdoor trojans and computer worms infecting your computer. In the past it was possible to manually remove some of these infections but they are becoming increasingly more sophisticated so that it has now reached a point where most anti-spyware programs can no longer detect and remove them. To remove them you need to scan your system with an equally sophisticated spyware removal tool capable of removing the computer worms, trojans and spyware browser hijackers that can cause this problem.
About:Blank Behavior And Why They're So Difficult To Remove
In a small percentage of cases the cause may be due to a startpage trojan or the "I Love You" worm, which sets the browser homepage to a blank page. However, the main cause of this problem is due to CWS browser hijacker infections. Browser hijackers are not viruses and are therefore undetectable by anti-virus programs. The browser hijackers that cause this problem replace your browser start page with a HTML file that resides on your computer which characteristically has its address set to 'about:blank'. It has the appearance of a search engine with links to various products for sale [screenshot]. Income is earned by its owners and affiliates if you visit any of these paid ad links.
A BHO (Browser Helper Object) is installed in your web browser which consumes system resources slowing down your computer and internet connection. The more sophisticated variants dynamically change their executable to evade the simple hash recognition methods used by the majority of anti-spyware programs. Executable code may be stored in your browser's cache. Hidden dlls will restore the hijacker if its files are deleted and they can be difficult to purge from memory. They can restore their registry definitions if they've been deleted. They start with Windows and can restore their Windows startup settings if they've been deleted.
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