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Conduit adware compels you into using imposed services

Tuesday 12 November 2013, 5:49AM

By Eric Molongo

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Conduit Search adware
Conduit Search adware Credit: Eric Molongo

Online advertising being a fairly profitable business, it is quite a lure for the individuals who adopt aggressive ad tactics notwithstanding the moral side of the matter. An example of one such product is Conduit Search which has been identified as adware and browser hijacker. Users who have installed browser extensions such as Search Protect, Community Toolbar by Conduit or BrotherSoft Extreme Toolbar ultimately run into an annoying issue of not being able to set their own browsing preferences. That’s because the affiliated third-party apps enforce the use of a certain search system along with a pre-defined browser homepage that the user might not be willing to use. This technique ensures that a lot of people will navigate to web pages that deliver ads, for example Search.conduit.com, which in its turn means the bad guys get big earnings.

Trying to correct things the manual way by entering the right values into browser configuration is unfortunately to no avail since the parental add-ons will automatically change it all back. This hints at one of the conclusions with regard to Conduit Search virus: you cannot get rid of it until the associated software is removed from the infected computer system. Some of the effective means for this include uninstalling the culprits via Control Panel’s Add/Remove Programs interface as well as deleting the corrupt extensions from the browser, setting the desired startup URL, and removing Conduit from the list of the browser’s default search engines. In some cases it might be required to also modify the Target parameter within settings for the browser’s shortcut.

In order to make sure nothing malicious was left unattended, it’s also strongly advised to scan the PC with reliable security software. This way you can also ascertain that the system registry information added by Conduit is no longer there. All-in-one guides available online will assist you in performing Search.conduit.com hijacker removal the right way.