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I have a very sticky search engine (searchinterneat-a.akamaihd.net) hijack in my Firefox browser. My BF already:

  • removed the program,
  • removed all traces in the registry,
  • removed addons,
  • restored default values for search and newtab in the Firefox configuration (about:config)

This fixed the problem for a while, but today it came back. There don't seem to be any entries about it in the registry, there are no suspicious addons, yet when I reset the configuration entries to their default values the immediately get back to the malware when I open a new tab.

Any ideas how to get rid of this? (None of the advices I found so far seem to address my problem proper.) I'd rather not reinstall everything.

Marleen Morisse
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1 Answers1

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A search engine hijack may not necessarily be a problem on your computer so the answers in that other question linked in a comment may not help in the format they are specified.

What I mean is that a search engine hijack can be caused by changes to your network router instead of your computer.

See for example this article about a backdoor in a particular Arris router; the author of this article says (in a comment to his article) that criminals from certain country use this type of vulnerabilities to change users DNS (with malicious intent).

To determine whether this is the case you can:

  1. Check if any other browser is similarly hijacked (if it's caused by the router, all browsers would likely behave in the same way).
  2. User a free service such as the F-Secure Router checker or e.g. the trial version of F-Secure Freedome which also protects against router hijack.
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