It's just one step beyond accidentally installing the Ask Toolbar with a new Java install. ![]() but it does not appear to compromise your system badly enough to require a reformat and clean install. It is annoying, scammy, scummy, evil, etc. It is not believed to exhibit the other characteristics of malware. However, the SearchProtect install bundled with µTorrent is only malware to the extent that it prevents you from changing your browser defaults. That is a general rule for malware that you do not know anything about. Wipe and re-install, then very carefully restore backups of data. > Once "they've" run malware on your machine it's no longer your machine and nothing can be trusted. Sucks that she has to use Windows, but that's academia in the UK for you. PS: And yes, I've told my girlfriend to organise her backups, ensure she's got everything and in a week or two we'll do the full reinstall thing. This was a huge time-suck, and it's been years since I wandered through the registry. We chose to nuke her sync'd profile and the local copy entirely, and then install everything from fresh. Firefox scrubbed clean fairly quickly, but it was Chrome that really seemed determined to change search provider and home page. Interestingly, Chrome proved more susceptible to this than Firefox. Thankfully my girlfriend doesn't use IE, so aside from purging all extensions and resetting all defaults, I didn't have to concentrate on that. Deleted all local profile folders from %APP_DATA% and other hidden locations.ġ0) Manually entered the registry and deleted anything I identified as Search Protect, conduit, Firefox, and Chrome.ġ1) Manually delete any files identified by anything in the registry or earlier steps ![]() But I'm wary of doing that.ġ) Use SysInternals Process Explorer to check for and kill any monitoring processĢ) Use SysInternals Autoruns to find and remove all autorun info that I didn't recognise and to identify which executables may be doing itģ) Uninstall component through control panelĥ) Change home page settings in browsers (restart, and observed that it only worked until the browser restarted)Ħ) Removed all browser plugins and extensions on all browsers, where I didn't recognise the extensionĨ) Viewed source of Firefox browser config and still couldn't find it, but found Chrome had some crappy values referring to this stuffĩ) Downloaded Chrome and Firefox, then uninstalled Chrome and Firefox. Most Googling finds pages telling you to download this or that scan and remove tools. I'm afraid I can't help a great deal as it was a one-off brute force effort.
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