# false hyperlinks **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 20, 2004, 9:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/false-hyperlinks/230274 "2004-02-20T21:54:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![zapomel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/67e7ee/32.png) [@zapomel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zapomel)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2004, 9:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/false-hyperlinks/230274/1 "2004-02-20T21:54:48Z")
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? ---
**Author:** ![127.0.0.1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/1/258eb7/32.png) [@127.0.0.1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/127.0.0.1)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2004, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/false-hyperlinks/230274/2 "2004-02-20T22:29:07Z")
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](http://security.kolla.de/) will remove most such programs, as well as a host of other privacy-related features. ---
**Author:** ![zapomel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/67e7ee/32.png) [@zapomel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zapomel)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2004, 1:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/false-hyperlinks/230274/3 "2004-02-22T01:41:49Z")
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.