A little while ago a customer needed me to clean up his laptop. He had accidentally downloaded some junk programs and search engines. He was seeing lots of ad and his search engine on his browser had changed. I figured it would be relatively simple to remove, but this one surprised me.

Here are the steps I used to remove the Yahoo redirect virus.

1. I uninstalled the junk programs I found.

2. I ran Malwarebytes and removed all the threats I found.

3. I removed all the weird search engines and home pages I found in Internet Explorer and Google Chrome.

4. I ran ccleaner to get rid of unnecessary registry files and trash that got installed.

5. I restarted the computer and it was fast and seemed to be working fine. However, when  I did a search in Google Chrome this stupid Yahoo redirect came up.

So I tried a couple more things. I removed all the extensions and add-ons in Chrome. I also made a new Chrome profile.  I did a couple searches and I thought I had gotten the virus finally removed, so I told the customer he was all fixed up.

It wasn’t long later the customer contacted me that he was still getting the Yahoo redirect every now and then. When he did a Google search most of the time it would return a Google search result but 10% of the time the stupid Yahoo search engine would come up.
Continue reading →