June 11, 2020 By Pieter Arntz
The latest type of installer in the saga of search hijacking changes a Chrome policy which tells users it can’t be removed because the browser is managed from the outside.
As you can imagine, that has freaked out quite a few Chrome users.
We have talked about the search hijacker’s business model in detail. Suffice to say, it is a billion-dollar industry and a lot of search hijackers want a piece of this action as even a small portion can amount to a hefty income.
One search hijacker doesn’t generate large amounts of cash for threat actors, like ransomware or banking Trojans. So, the publishers are always looking for ways to get installed on large numbers of systems and stay installed for as long as possible.
It also should not come as a surprise that ethics are no priority for many of them. As long as they can rake in their redirect fees, they couldn’t care less about your inconvenience of being stuck with a default search provider that you would not have picked yourself.