hey, something pretty strange happened to one of my pc's today and i
can sure use any help/info that i can get...

first of all, i try to be pretty good about "battening down the
hatches" security-wise, and i always use a good, beefed-up hosts file.
one of the entries i have in the hosts file is:
127.0.0.1 sitefinder.verisign.com

however, i noticed late yesterday that sitefinder was getting through
again. i went to check the hosts file, and the entry for that *plus
alot of other stuff had disappeared from the hosts file and that its
size had gone from about 150k down to 34k. i have absolutely no idea
why.

anyhoo, today when reading a story on the neowin site, i noticed that
a few static words on the page had strange links associated with them,
and when i'd roll over them with my mouse, a yellow popup ad would
appear. after a small bit of research i was able to see they were
associated with some "itxt.vibrantmedia" site. i'm assuming this is
very much like ezula top text?

i did some googling and didn't find much. i ran both adaware and
spybot, but neither of them found a thing. i decided to try
downloading another hosts file, and it seems to be working properly
again now, as both sitefinder and itxt.vibrantmedia are blocked and
those strange links on the neowin page i saw them on earlier have
disappeared.

so, does anyone know if i still need to worry about 'uninstalling'
that vibrantmedia shiz-nit at this point even though it now seems to
be blocked by my hosts?

also, has anyone ever heard of their hosts file 'shrinking' the way
i've described at the begining of this post? i don't want that
happening again...

thanks.

--
"enjoy every sandwich."
-warren zevon