Hi, I’ve seen in my Autoruns that Internet explorer is listed in Image Hijacks, though I don’t see any other program listed anywhere that could be hijacking it (like it seems should be the case from here in the Image Hijack section).
In fact when I go to the registry entry listed below, there’s only one value: “C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\IEXPLORE.EXE” -nohome
Would anyone know how I could find out why IE is considered to be Image Hijacked?
If you read our second lesson about Process Explorer, you would have learned that you can replace Task Manager with Process Explorer, but you probably had no idea how this actually happens, much less that malware can and does use the same technique to hijack applications on your computer.
You can set a number of settings in the registry that control how things are loaded, including hijacking all executables and running them through another process, or even assigning a “debugger” to any executable — even if that application is not a debugger.
Essentially, you can assign values in the registry so that if you try to load notepad.exe, it will load calc.exe instead. Or any application can be swapped out and replaced with another application. This is one of the ways that malware blocks you from loading MalwareBytes or other anti-malware tools.
You can see it for yourself — on the left-hand side is the name of the executable, and on the right-hand side the “Debugger” key is set to the instance of Process Explorer that is running off my desktop. But you can change that to anything you want on either side and it will work. It would probably make a great prank that almost nobody would ever be able to figure out.
The internet uses html … the vast majority of web pages are that format
HyperText Markup Language, commonly referred to as HTML, is the standard markup language used to create web pages.
Web browsers can read HTML files and render them into visible or audible web pages.