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Binkiland provides custom homepage along with redundant ads

Tuesday 24 March 2015, 12:59AM

By Viorel Ramos

785 views

Ideally, browser extensions are meant to perform a variety of user experience enhancement tasks. It’s pretty hard to imagine web surfing without add-ons that make the browser appearance brighter, allow for more engaging online communication and refine some essential Internet navigation features. On the other hand, it’s really easy to imagine web surfing without tools like Binkiland, because they are created with bad intensions in mind.

From a purely technical perspective, Binkiland looks just like the average browser helper object. It purportedly accommodates features for customizing the start page in Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer and improving some online search aspects. With this fairly useful tip of the iceberg stated upfront, the concealed rest of it is a mess. This add-on turns your browsing preferences upside down, making custom settings no longer applicable. It replaces the URL values for new tab page, homepage and default search with binkiland.com, which means from that moment on you will be repeatedly visiting the unwanted page. Titled “Binkiland Search”, the site’s design is reminiscent of Google, but that’s obviously a catch so that people won’t notice the change. When something is typed in the search box there, the service comes up with results complemented by multiple ads. By displaying sponsored content to hijacked users, the adware makes sure its authors get revenue from ad views and clicks on the links.

Both the alterations to browser settings and the installation of this program take place regardless of whether the user agrees or not. To get into a PC, Binkiland leverages obscure promotion by affiliated free products, for instance the TeamViewer Update, where the malign payload is hard-coded into the setup wizard. This approach makes the drive-by installation unnoticed most of the time. The only thing that works for stopping the annoying browser redirect activity is the removal of Binkiland extension, preferably combined with the use of a trusted cleaner application. To prevent this infection, one should always pay attention what might be hidden behind freeware setups.