Hotbar

[TexExpat]

Yesterday, I suddenly had something called Hotbar being installed into Exchange on a couple of my Citrix servers. From what I've been able to read, this evidently installs itself whenever some opens a message created with this "tool". Uninstalling through Add/Remove programs fails. We wound up deleting the files from the file system and removing any registry entry we could find relating to it.

My users, including the user that installed this thing, are all Domain Users, not Domain Admins, not Power Users. They should not have permission to install anything. So how was this thing able to install itself into Outlook? How can I prevent anyone else from installing it on another server? How can I uninstall this thing?

Thanks very much for any help you can offer.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Can't remember how we removed it, but had the same problem when I rolled out a public library implementation for the first time. The only solution is to block hotbar.com; As soon as a user visits this site, a plugin is automatically installed. The installer takes system priveleges, so everyone is affected - it's a real menace - I would go as far as to say it's a virus, although the product manufacturers would disagree, no doubt.

It sounds like it also installs some kind of vbs script which is used by Outlook. A trawl through the registry - and a re-create of user profiles might be necessary. I didn't see this, because of the nature of the public terminals; we only allowed Internet Explorer to run.

I hope someone else has the answer for de-installation - I don't fancy going to the test lab and trying!


Good Luck! CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[sg4me]

We had the same problem with people installing hotbar. Uninstalling does not work 100%. Get a program like AdWare and run it on the server. It removes hotbar and most any other spyware programs people install.

Goodluck
Ben Thaw