About: Blank is a program that hijacks your computer through the form of adware. Once it enters your computer, it takes control of the browser, the settings of your Internet connection and displays popup advertisements. While the About: Blank doesn’t do anything negative to your computer, per say, it does result in a waste of time and can open the door for other malware to enter and create flaws in the system.

You’ll know that you have About: Blank on your computer because it is a leach on virtual memory. If you are not running a single program, but notice in your Processes tab that the CPU is working at around 75-80%, that means that you are infected with something that is sucking up memory. There’s a chance that it could be about: blank. On top of that, if popup ads start to appear that are somewhat familiar to the content you’re browsing, there’s a good chance you’ve been hit by About: Blank.

How to Remove About: Blank

Sometimes, the adware program appears in the Add/Remove options in the control panel. If it’s there, remove it. But, for the most part, this doesn’t work. You can do a system restore back to a time when the computer wasn’t infected by the About: Blank. Even this might not work, though. The most difficult, but complete way of removing About: Blank is to do it manually.

The first thing to do is install HijackThis (an anti-hijacking program) and some sort of a registry defragmenting program. The choice is yours on which to use, but Reglite.exe has been considered to be a good one. The reason you want to use these is because they are particularly good at locating the hidden dll file without the hijacker knowing. This means that you can secure your system without him trying to attack again.

Once the programs are installed, open Registrar Lite and move to the following entry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrent VersionWindows

Look for a key named “AppInit_DLLs.” The value that is inside this key is the hidden dll file. Once this is removed, the computer will go back to normal. But, don’t start deleting yet. First write down the name of the file. Since the file name is different for each computer, we’ll assume the file name is hidden.dll. But, it could be anything that the hijacker wanted to name the file.

Restart the computer in Recovery Console mode. can either use the Windows disk or type cd windowssystem32 and then press Enter.

To remove the read-only characteristic of the file, type ATTRIB -R hidden.dll. Obviously, change the hidden.dll to the name of the file that you found when doing the search described above. Now that you can access the file, rename it.. Type “RENAME hidden.dll badfile.dll” This will rename the file–in this, hidden.dll–into a different name, badfile.dll. Type Exit and then press Enter. This will reboot Windows. The computer should be functioning normally.