Someone just made this post on my forum

"One of my blogs is showing Kontera links…but I’ve never signed up for Kontera!!! This is really weird. Is it possible that someone "hijacked" my blog and is using their code on my site?

Has anyone else had this happen?"

—————————–

I had an immediate answer, because this very problem happened to us yesterday.

My daughter Kate (I’m now employing her as a writer 3 days a week, the rest of the time she reads the news on ABC radio) was sitting next to me writing a piece on her laptop for one of my travel blogs www.travelfoodandwine.com when she asked "what are these links, have you added something to the blog"

I called the same page up on my computer and couldn’t see the links, so I got her to run a spyware checker that I’d just bought - Spyzooka - and it picked up a number of spyware progs which had found their way past her antivirus scanner.

She used the tool to remove them and the Kontera links went away.

I bought Spyzooka because I had big problems of my own last week.

My main computer has been playing up…the cd player packed in, Skype stopped working, it slowed to a crawl, kept rebooting, lots of niggly little things which took up way too much time.

Surely not a virus or spyware I thought. I’ve got the latest Trend Micro PC-cillin Internet Security running in the background and auto updating every day so I felt quite secure…but when I took a closer look at PC-cillin it turned out that some clever piece of spyware had managed to disable most of the functions  while still letting it appear to be working.

So I did a search and  Spyzooka looked promising, so I downloaded the free trial version to check for problems and found that  I’d got 8 different bits of spyware on my hard drive.

To quote from their site: "SpyZooka removes 100% of your spyware, adware, hijackers, keyloggers, unwanted toolbars, dialers, trojan horses and malware on the first scan or I give you a free update in less than 24 hours that will. Plus SpyGuard prevents future infection."

8 spyware problems! Really annoying….I hate the stuff.

Unfortunately the trial will only detect the problem, not remove it. But for your peace of mind it’s well worth checking out, and if you find you have problems it doesn’t cost much to get the unlocked version and clean your machine.

phil