false hyperlinks

Hi. Odd thing I saw the other day. I sometimes use a communal computer at work, with many users, and it’s probably crawling with contagion but seems to function all right so far… but the other day, I was checking the news and my mail on yahoo, and in several of my windows, it just randomly hyperlinked about every fifth word, underlined them in blue. I even clicked on a few, but just got some error message saying there was no site or something.
I hit ctl alt del to see if anything weird was running, and of course had no idea what all the programs were, but the only thing that I think I’d NEVER seen before was called SP, or something like that… two letters, anyway. I shut it down and the problem stopped. Has anyone ever seen that?

it’s called hijackware. There are quite a few flavors out there, most simply parse the text of a page, looking for key words thier advertisers have bought, and link them to said advertiser’s website.

Spybot, search and destroy will remove most such programs, as well as a host of other privacy-related features.

Ah, excellent. If it happens again, I’ll check out that Search and destroy thing. Thanks a lot, sorry I didn’t get back to this for a bit.