Got rid of that sucker...took awhile. What a piece of shit, malicious infestation that I never asked for. Hope it don't come back!
No, I have no idea. I don't remember a prompt asking if I wanted it, but those accept/decline things are becoming harder to spot. To get rid of it, in Firefox, and it seems to be similar in Chrome, etc. I had to delete it from the plugins and extensions place. But it still came back and could not be found. Then I had to type "about:config" in the address bar to access the hidden plugins. Once there I found it had entered something like 10 or 12 revisions. All had to be reset or changed back to Google search.
With stuff like this they are now making those "agree/disagree/cancel" pop-ups so they are one big "agree" button... No matter where you click is an "agree". The more malicious stuff can just sneak in there without any warning if they can get past your anti virus/anti malware protection. Have you scanned with Malwarebytes to be sure the system is clean?
This one seemed to automatically install along with something without my knowledge (unless I was just lazy and not looking at the installation terms and conditions). I'm fairly certain that spybot listed it as adware, and removed it. It was still on there at a later time, so perhaps it could've been one of those codecs you need to stream videos on certain websites. Manually removing it all/spybot worked for me. Best of luck to you all with this annoyance. I hope whoever made it sleeps with one eye open at night...
A vast number of apps that are free downloads have toolbars or other crap bundled with them and they are selected for installation by default. For example if you go to download Adobe reader right now you will notice it will also install McAfee Security Scan Plus and that the checkbox is selected by default. I guarantee you most people only notice the huge yellow "Download Now" button and click before reading. Other sites such as game sites that provide those cheesy little games, like POGO.com, 99% of the time will also install other crap by default, often not as safe as something McAfee (even though it is garbage software that they have to trick people into installing on their systems, but I digress), unless you take the time to read all the agreements and crap and make sure it is installing only what you want. More often than not what happens is someone goes to download/install some game or cheesy app, they start to read the shit then it's like "yeah, yeah, blah, blah blah" CLICK--CLICK--CLICK, and it's installed along with whatever else may have been included. Two days later it's "WTF!! where did that come from?"
Toolbars PISS me off! I used to like download.com to get stuff but recently instead of a direct download of the app you want, they give you an installer with 5 or more PISS OFF toolbars to uncheck before it DL's the program you want. Nothing says "I'm a despicable software company" quite like a mother fucking TOOLBAR! ... and I don't want to change my home page to your site either, you rotten pricks!
Man I hate these goddamn fucking toolbars... and I especially hate how now when you're installing something it just comes up like its part of the regular installation, so if you're not paying attention and just hit next, bam its on there... fuck AND its harder to get rid of now to, before you could just go into add/remove programs, find it and delete... now you have to do it on all your individual web browsers and shit... again, fuck
