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hijacking a page


AlexC

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Although I have been using HTML since 1997 to build web pages, I only started to build a 'modern' website with server and browser scripting and databases at the start of 2013 and have been finding W3schools extremely useful in starting to learn Javascript, PHP, CSS, etc. I have had a very steep learning curve in terms of security and got caught out by an add on which I didn't know I had downloaded until I used a screen recorder to experiment with making a tutorial video. I started the recording session fine by selecting the window I wanted to record - the home page of a website - and then suddenly my title line changed, with the significant words becoming a different font and colour, underlined and with links and an advertisement banner appeared at the bottom of the page. No other pages or websites suffered from the problem, nor did this page if I used another computer, so it was obviously linked to the screen recorder and this particular computer. I looked at the source code of the page (in the browser) and that had not apparently been altered and the URL was still showing as normal. I tracked it down to a SuperLyric addon and a bit of searching suggests there are quite a few of these adware programs around.

 

The question I have is, given that the source code in the browser seemed to be unchanged and the URL unchanged, what is the mechanism by which my home page was altered and is there any technique for preventing this uninvited inclusion of links and ads into a page? I am assuming that it is some form of browser script, hence trying this forum.

 

As an aside, as I am building this web site for a charity, if anyone knows of a good open source screen recorder without uninvited extras, I would be grateful for the information.

 

 

Many thanks.

Edited by AlexC
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Looking at the source code shows what was downloaded from the server, not the current state of the page. You'll need to use your browser's developer tools if you want to be able to inspect the "live" DOM that it is actually rendering. They would use Javascript to change things on the page.

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