I am a responsible internet-user. I always read the privacy policy and rarely fill out forms online. But, somehow, I’ve gotten nailed anyway.
If I leave my PC idle, with no web browser open, for some period of time, a pop-up ad appears in a browser window. The window has no menu bars, address bar, etc. The ads are for real, legitimate, respectable online businesses, not porn shops, so I probably made a mistake somewhere and accidentally gave someone permission to abuse me like this.
How can I find the offending cookie, setting, whatever?
I am willing to delete all cookies, if I have to, but I don’t know how.
mrblue92, I think you misunderstood my question. So, I’ll give more information. I am using IE 5.50.something and the ads are not coming from my ISP.
I don’t even think that the ads are spawning from a website I visit, since my browser is closed when they appear - they pop-up at random. While I was writing that last sentence, an ad fro a 0% apr “get smart” Visa card appeared!
What has happened is that advertisers looked at the alleged “success rate” of pop-up ad click-thru’s, and have been bullying the more and more desperate websites into using them. Really annoying.
Get ZoneAlarm. it sets up a “firewall” on your personal computer. I don’t have the url handy, but just put it into download.com or Yahoo and you should find it. It’s free. Another one is AdsOff which gets rid of ads on your computer. Unofrtunately it is only good for 30 days then you have to buy it.
Yep, Ad-Aware is your first stop – Zone Alarm is all well and good (for other kinds of naughty behaviour) but it wouldn’t rid you of this and it probably wouldn’t have prevented it happening"
Check out your registry (I’m assuming you’re at a pretty high computer-literacy level) under “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run”. Some program or plug-in you accepted might have placed an entry in this registry key which, at startup, runs a background program which periodically polls the Internet to get a pop-up ad.
I worked for a place that created such programs (although ours always put an icon on the system tray, so where the ads come from was not a mystery), and that’s how they worked.
Next up: I’d go for it being part of a programme you installed for other reasons. For example, I recall installing one of those download accelerators programmes (Possibly ‘GoZilla’) and also, unknowingly, being burdened with additional, unwanted adware as part of the ‘deal’
Is that possible ?
Also, do you have Zone Alarm installed (as it can identify – by asking for your permission to connect - what is trying to connect to the web from your hard drive) ?
I’ll second the WebWasher recommendation-- It’s a fantastic little app. I’ve used it now for years and can’t imagine surfing the web without it. If you don’t have it by now, definitely get it.
Not that this program will help you now, it’s too late. Your nefarious pop-up has already loaded itself into some part of your system.
If I had to guess, I’d say the pop-up program is running out of the temp folder. Dig around in there and you should be able to spot it.
If that’s not your game, or you want to take the simplest route, try the adaware program linked to above. Even if it ends up not working (Which it should), it still is a good app to run periodically to keep your system clean.
Again, however, Adaware will/should/often does do it for you as part of its clean process.
If that doesn’t happen to catch it for some reason, I’d then make my way into the registry like cmkeller said.
And after it was all back to normal, I’d go into my security setting tab, and then the advanced settings tab of IE, and crank up those security settings. I’d make my system prompt me for damn near everything except cookies. Specifically, I’d make sure Active X settings were set to prompt for all instances.
There is absolutely no reason this kind of program should make its way onto your system without you knowing about it. The fact that it did should worry the hell out of ya.
The reason I asked what browser is that cookies are sometimes aren’t always stored in the same place. I use IE 5.50 too, and my cookies wind up in the c:\windows\cookies directory. They are also in c:\windows emporary internet files. Usually if I feel like cleaning house, I’ll blow away everything in both directories except my SDMB and Amazon cookies. (However, I do use the IE function to delete most of the temporary files and then manually take care of the cookies it doesn’t touch.)
But like I said, I don’t think it’s cookies. Personally I would not put it past an ISP to toss up advertisements if you’ve been sitting idle (unless you’re going through school or company dial-up, in which case it’d be unlikely). It’s also possible the page you were sitting on had a timed javascript that pops up a new ad after X minutes.
Alright, sd, you’ve always been a nice chap to me, so I went back… way back, and looked through the archives of a newsletter I recieve to find the exact settings that I use on my system.
Ever since I used this guys settings as a guide to my own IE 5.5 settings, I haven’t had a problem with nefarious programs getting on my system.
Thanks for the link - I’ve read it and will go about implementing his suggestions.
BUT - The offending “whateveritis” is already on my system and AdAware has not been able to do anything about it.
Like I said above, I cleaned out my Temporary Internet Folder at 1:00 today (CST). In the two hours since then, 223 items have been created in that folder. Some of them are from the sites I’ve visited, mostly the SDMB and the UnaBoard.
Hi sd - Just checking: You have ticked all the boxes in Ad-Aware (Drives, memory, etc) and deleted the suspicious items (or at least sent them to a floppy or whatever…) ?
If you’ve pretty much only been to the SDMB since ‘cleaning’, it’s difficult to believe you picked up all that list ?
Mea Culpa. I think I made a mistake. When I ran AdAware the first time, I assumed (big mistake) that the applicaction wanted me to check all items it should save.
But, that’s not how it works. It wants me to check items to delete.
So, I ran it again and things look Kosher now. ;j
The offenders (whom I’ve deleted) seem to be CometCursor, Double Click and AdMonitor. Bu-Buy!
Thanks to all of you for your help… I will keep you posted if anything goes awry again.
