Great suggestion! A million thanks.

Hi, I'm a recently new user of a Mac. Unfortunatly my web browsers have been hijacked also. Although I'm not entirely familiar with the mac interface, I am A+ certified in PCs. Im not a regular for these forums but i just couldnt leave unsaid that you guys are all ENTIRELY WRONG about what hijacking is.

Hijacking is when you visit a website (a bad one with malware) and you somehow end up installing or accidentally accepting some kind of bad program etc. From there, your BROWSER (not the web, the server or anything of that sort...) gets basically hacked. You can almost call it a virus that has only 1 purpose : Redirect any site you visit to a desired site. This process IS random and most of the time has NOTHING to do with the site you are visiting. FOR EXAMPLE: apple.com has never been infected by this bug/virus. It IS LOCAL ON YOUR MACHINE therefore it is impossible for this to be duplicated on a collegue's machine unless he also has been hijacked.

How to fix it?
Well I have fixed a few cases of this on PCs but never faced this problem on a mac. On pcs, you basically sort through the running processes in the background (the registry) and you remove the suspicious ones until the hijacking has stopped. On pcs, it is also OFTEN resorted to reformatting the harddrive and re-installing windows as a last case scenario but I don't even know if that's possible on a mac.

I hope this gives you a better idea in order to set you onto the right track, because right now you guys are way off.

Welcome to the forum 2ocenT. You are correct that windows computers can be hijacked in the way you describe, but you'll find that most malware targets windows machines because of lax security in IE. This doesn't happen as easily in Safari on a mac.

It's theoretically possible to install malware with Safari (there are some known exploits), but there are no known instances of this in the wild as far as I am aware of. I could put an application on a web site that changes all of your web settings, but not without you pretty explicitly running it and possibly typing in your login password to specifically allow it.

Actually, the right answer *was* the WebTrend product run by his company doing things to the DNS server to monitor and control web browsing access. When that server timed out on the DNS request, it gave a bogus IP address to a "buy domains" site. This is contrary to the DNS specification, but lots of ISPs use this trick to drive traffic to their advertising.

It is possible to do this on the server side without a local malware exploit because the domain name service on your computer talks to a specific server with a numeric IP address. This server translates host names to IP addresses. These host name / address translations are cached locally.

Some companies use a DNS server that filters IP addresses from prohibited domains (even home routers can filter DNS). Every registered domain has a TTL (time to live) field associated with it, so some site addresses will cache for a day before asking the server again, others will cache only for an hour, so are more likely to appear hijacked.

So, we were on the right track, but your point about what it means to be hijacked is usually valid for windows computers.

The "hijacking" terminology was applied by the OP at the beginning of the mystery, before slacker accurately diagnosed the true nature of the problem. I'm pretty sure everyone involved in assisting with this issue understands that the incident in this case was not actual hijacking. Believe it or not, just because we use Macs, we're not totally clueless about the rest of the big, bad world. ;)

[says strangeblood, who is also A+ certified, for all the good it does]

Wow, nice gravedig.

Seeing as it hasn't been mentioned, a lot of redirects these days are also caused by rogue flash ads or unparsed javascript injected into the comments or content.

If you get unexpectedly redirected to somewhere unrelated, try turning off javascript or plugins* and reloading the original page. Note if it's a rogue flash ad it will be in rotation along with a load of legitimate advertising so redirects will be random and simply reloading the original page will often avoid the redirect.

If it is a javascript or flash exploit fire a message to the site owner letting them know that they have a problem with the page or ad, don't forget the url and details.

* will disable flash.

Annoying Adware
 

Hi,

My mate recommended I join this forum to get rid of this adware that has attached itself to my Mac OSX4.

Basically, on every website where this a space for ads, it has this one ad popping up. This is most apt as it is about getting a bigger penis, johnson, wifes best friend. Not only is it annoying, but after 3 months of bombardment I am starting to feel inadequate... and I was known as The Monster in my better days.

It is on Firefox, Safari, and Camino.

I tried deleting dodgy looking cookies but ended up messing up Googlemail and God knows what else.

Can anyone help free me from this nonsense, please.

Would be much appreciated.

Bimble

Would a redirect issue persist after clearing all of the Conduit, etc. plug-ins from the target system, even years later in Mavericks?

I can't say.
Redirects (after all these years!) tend to be the result of adware.
Try the good tool from this site to do a quick scan for adware.
http://www.thesafemac.com/art/

Also, check in your Safari/Preferences/Extensions for bogus-looking items that you can remove.