Browser Hijacker
What is Home page hijacker and Browser hijackers

How interesting is it to know there are people who want to know your surfing habits from a very remote location? Seems funny? But actually these people have went so far in their job to understand the way you browse, the sites you visit and even they are equipped with sophisticated software to dig the most valuable data from your computer.

One of the commonly employed tactics is to install a browser hijacker in the system. Browserhijackers are tools that knowingly or unknowingly alter the settings of your browser, or install helper objects to hijack data that your web browser relays. Browserhijackers come in the Trojan category of the viruses. A browserhijacker installs itself in some remote and undetected corner of your system, starting to hijack your browser.

These are some of the few things a browser hijacker can do.

• A browser hijacker can set your home page to the site the creator needs it to be; these types of browser hijackers are called home page hijackers. Home page hijackers can be best described as a browser hijacker which can force you to view a particular web page, either increasing their hit count or displaying ads.
  
  
• A browser hijacker can install a browser helper object that can relay or capture data from your computer and completely control the Browser. These browser helper objects (BHOs) are software installed to get the complete list of URLs you typed, clicked links, passwords entered, credit card numbers, forms you submit etc and more.
  
  
• A browser hijacker can change your system settings such as startup programs list, change Windows Policies or can alter your Internet settings at any time they like.
  
  
• Since browser hijackers automatically and anonymously connect to the Internet, by using your modem, it may cause serious loss if you are browsing using a dial-up connection.

Typically, browser and home page hijacker act as spyware that are installed without any user interaction. A browserhijacker can simply relay anything the creator of your program needs, and now a days browser and home page hijacker software are getting so intelligent that they even can restore settings if you manually undo settings changed by them. Browserhijacker do not need a user interface either. Not to mention, browser hijacker are very difficult to identify and to remove.

What is the best possible way to keep your privacy?

The best possible way is to keep a spyware and adware removal utility. that can scan your system and search and remove browser hijackers and other spyware. Spyware removal software is available in plenty now a days. Make sure you download the spyware removal utility that can update its database with newly found spyware.

Keep away from freeware software that tempts you a lot to download and use them. Modem speeding up, Internet speeding, speeding up the computer etc are some popular phrases they may use. These may come with spyware, including browserhijacker and other Trojans.