Macintosh Web Browsers Get Infected

Macintosh Web Browsers Get Infected

I had just came from a local junior college, Santiago Junior College and used their WiFi system in their parking lot.  I got a warning that the site was not secure but I used it anyway.  When I got home all my web browsers were infected.  My browser kept giving me a warning keeping me from proceeding doing any work on my laptop.  Whenever I tried to do a search I would see the following on my Macintosh laptop:

“The owner of www.mozilla.org has configured their website improperly. To protect your information from being stolen, Firefox has not connected to this website.”

I found the culprit in the Safari Extensions tab.  Then I also found that the home page was also taken over in the General tab.  I ran MacAvast system scan and it found one issue but would not identify it.  I installed AVAST security for Firefox and the problem was solved for that browser.  In Chrome I found that chumsearch was the default search setting by going to Chrome >  Preferences > Settings > Search > Manage Search Engines.

Click on “Manage search engines …”.  You should then see that chumsearch.com is the default.  I just made another search engine the default.  I was then able to delete the “search.chumsearch.com” malware.  I quit Chrome and then reopened it to check the default search engine.  Chrome shows that chum search was entered as default web page on startup.

Ever since I deleted chumsearch from my computer and have had no issues since.

Revised April 16, 2018.

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