CNET: Morpheus gives Web surfers a detour [via Slashdot: Morpheus Hijacks Browsers For Affiliate Links] The Slashdot writeup is better than any quote I could pull from the article:
Morpheus has begun silently installing a browser plugin on its users’ machines that basically hijacks the web browser even when not running Morpheus. An afflicted browser will sense if a user is going to visit a shopping site like Yahoo! or Amazon, and secretly send them to a different site instead and then redirect them from this site to the user’s intended destination. The user will not be aware that this is happening… however the site doing the redirecting will benefit because they are set up as an affiliate partner and will get a commission on the backs of the user.
Surely the big sites will not actually pay up when these “affiliates” come asking for their fees. This is just affiliate bombing, and will die a quick and painful death, just like all the other make-money-fast schemes that these bottom-feeders have come up with. Stick with the GPL’d Gnucleus client for your file sharing needs.
Update: BHOCop is a free utility that will show you this type of browser plugin and allow you to disable them. I had one from Adobe, which is probably harmless (I believe it allows you to read PDFs in your browser). Anything else should be treated with suspicion. Morpheus’s plugin is called bpboh.dll and should be disabled immediately. (You will probably need to reboot for changes to take effect.)
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