my keywords come up as hyperlinks to someone elses site

[cazz124]

I was looking at my site and there are a variety of words hyperlinked to dealtime and other sellers, is this the browser or has someone broken into my site?????
you can see it on the zodiac candles site especially!

[James M SellerDeck]

Hi there

Whats the URL's of your sites so we can have a look, can you point to the page/section where this is happening?

[Mike Hughes]

I think it on the zodiac candles page not site.

I don't seen anything like that, and it sounds to me like you've got one of those spyware programs on your PC that can do this.

I've never had on of these but you should try downloading spybot and running spybot. That can usually catch these things.

Mike

[James M SellerDeck]

I dont get it either, but I have just run spybot on my machine...

[Mike Hughes]

James, the spyware (or whatever it's called) program has to be running on the viewers PC. What it does is replace targetted keywords in the browser window with links to sponsors sites.

The site itself is fine and the same thing happens whatever site the keywords appears on. It's just the users PC that's corrupted.

Kind of clever, but nasty!

Mike

[cazz124]

Thanks chaps,
it doesnt do it on my home laptop, it was on one of the school PCs that I was showing another teacher my website and all the odd hyperlinks came up, their computers wont even let me check mail on AOL so something must have sneaked through all their systems
as you said very clever! it had found any word to do with jewellery and hyperlinked them,is this allowed? or is it just unsporting?

[Mike Hughes]

The makers say the software is used by people who have agreed to what it does and want it for their benefit. in which case you can't really say it's illegal.

The issue is though that this gets downloaded onto their PC without people realising what it does (often on the back of some other software) and doesn't have the usual uninstall options.

So not illegal, but still nasty stuff.

Mike