Remove Yahoo Search virus

Installing an arbitrary app on the Internet is a perilous activity these days, especially if it’s freeware. Due to intense competition, lots of program creators adhere to trial offer tactics or a freeware approach in order to win reputation before going commercial. While making people acquainted with their products for free, these guys sometimes choose to participate in bundling schemes, whereby they make ends meet by letting third-party software install on the computers of their newly acquired customers as an extra. The potentially unwanted program called Yahoo Search, is an application that gets promoted by taking advantage of the above technique.

Antivirus engines of the leading security suites out there label this entity as adware or PUP for a reason. Not only does its payload stick to other setups so that the user has no clue that a piece of malware is about to get in, Yahoo search also distorts the way web browsers work on the affected system. Since this bug is cross-browser, it can impact the major Internet surfing software including MS Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox. Such settings as the new tab page, homepage and default search engine for these browsers undergo Yahoo search noisome influence. The adware makes these values point to http://search.yahoo.com instead of whatever URL was configured by the user.

The landing page mentioned above is not crammed up with exploits or drive-by downloads, but it’s a problem anyway. To begin with, there’s a privacy issue associated with Yahoo search because it automatically studies your search and online browsing preferences. Why? Because it needs to display the ads that best suit your interests. These sponsored objects are incorporated into every results page on search.yahoo.com no matter what you look up on there. Secondly, visiting that site is not an opt-in since the virus doesn’t care whether you agree to have your browser’s custom settings modified or not. And to top it all off, you can’t resolve this problem by uninstalling the unwanted browser extension manually, because the configuration will get back to abnormal.

Source: malwareprotectioncenter.com