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.