I was browsing a website when I got an alert from my anti-virus program that a 'JS/IEStart' virus was in my system and that it could not be deleted.  I don't know what JS stands for but IEStart is the command for Internet Explorer start.  Therefore somebody was implanting a trojan virus into my system that would later use Internet explorer to give access to the hacker who created it (JS - I guess).  I immediately run a virus scan, replaced the registry with an earlier version (nobody should do it unless they know what they are doing) and replaced Internet Explorer.

But I would like to take this a step further and ask, why would anyone want to hack my computer?  I visited their site, I even liked it, viewed their ads, and contributed to the traffic amount that makes a website significant.  So why would one like to intrude my privacy in return for that?  Can the internet really be anything but a nuisance if we are going to have idiots creeping all around us - for what? - to mess up our computers?
This is darn ridiculous. What these suckers have to learn is what Willem Defaoe said in the movie 'Shadows of the vampire.' He was a cameraman and he was videotaping a vampire eating other people.  When the vampire turned to eat him, Defaoe said to him "you kill me and you go out of existense too"
Sameway, our internet use gives a 2 cent worth to these idiots. Already many of us are warming up to the increasing scrutiny of the internet by the Feds.

Take care yo all

gm

This particular trojan simply changes the default homepage for IE. Why anyone would want to use malware to do this is quite beyond my understanding, if anything changed my homepage, I would change it straight back, and would stay away from that site from then on. I agree entirely with your thoughts about intrusion, it cannot make sense if you want to attract the visitor back

Thanks Paul,

That makes sense, because I could not locate JS/Start in the registry or in the log of the anti-virus program - even though it initially detected the intrusion.  

Cheers now