Sneaky Toolbar Hijacks Browsers:

‘When I find the bastards who programmed this thing I’d be happy to castrate them with a pair of dull pinking shears,” fumed one of Xupiter’s many unhappy victims in a newsgroup posting.

Xupiter is an Internet Explorer toolbar program. Once active in a system, it periodically changes users’ designated homepages to xupiter.com, redirects all searches to Xupiter’s site, and blocks any attempts to restore the original browser settings.

(…) “When Xupiter first appeared, we spent a week trying to figure it out,” said Mike Healan, of SpywareInfo. “There’s a monstrous thread with over 26,000 page views where a couple dozen of us tested it until we figured what it did and how to deal with it.”

But Healan said that every time people sort out what Xupiter is doing, Xupiter’s programmers tweak its code. It also appears that Xupiter may be selling its “service” to other websites. ‘ Wired News