Monday, April 18, 2005

Hosts file redirect [WIN]

Have your hosts file installed for ad blocking, but still seeing adds from sites you know are in the file? Check this:


From http://www.michna.com/kb/wxnet.htm


The next most frequent cause is that a virus has pointed
the system to another hosts file.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
 \SYSTEM
  \CurrentControlSet
   \Services
    \Tcpip
     \Parameters
      Value of type REG_EXPAND_SZ
      Name: DataBasePath

The correct path where Windows finds the hosts
file should be:

%SystemRoot%\System32\drivers\etc

and only that path alone.

Several viruses are known to redirect Windows to the
Windows\help folder (or perhaps some other folder)
and put their own hosts file there. If you find this,
don't try to just correct the registry entry. You must
first remove the virus.


And having removed the virus, go fix the registry entry so the hosts file works.

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