Ut Oh! Another Browser Hijacked By the failing Ask.com

By | February 27, 2012
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Hijacked by Ask.comJoe’s Firefox has been hijacked by Ask.com
My firefox browser has been Taken over by something called ASK I cannot remove ASK in the control panel. HELP.

Our answer
Hi Joe. Ask is part of the FunWebProducts family of scumware. This scumbag family consists of such things as SmileyCentral, Webfetti, MyWay, iWon, Ask, and about fifteen other spyware/adware hijackers. You probably got Ask from a download which was bundled with Ask. No one in their right mind would ever download Ask. Ask used to be Ask Jeeves before the Interactive scumware corporation bought it and took the butler away.

If you just noticed Ask hijacking your browser, the surest way to divest yourself of it is to do a system restore – back to a time before you were infected  with Ask. If it’s been more than a few weeks your best bet would be to use Malwarebytes. The freeware version will clean the Ask infection just fine. The link we provide is for the freeware version – but if you can afford it, get the full version. The full version has real-time scanning which the free version doesn’t. Keep in mind that most antivirus programs won’t remove the Ask.com infection – and that is just what it is — an infection.

Ask is part of Interactive Corp. A company who decided long ago they couldn’t compete with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft – so they turned to ruining people’s computer with garbageware in order to maintain their measly 3% share of the search engine market. It’s pretty bad when you have to infect peoples’ computers with scumware in order to maintain a tiny 3%  share.

In a recent search engine market survey – Google was #1 with 65%, Bing (Microsoft) had about 13%, Yahoo had about 12% and Ask had  around 3%.

Joe – we caution you (and everyone) to be careful when downloading freeware. Many developers can’t resist when a company such as Ask offers to pay them $1.00 for every download. You can imagine, if you had a popular freeware program that is downloaded a thousand times a day, this would be quite tempting. We have been offered the same kind of thing many times – and we’ve turned every one of them down. That’s why we are broke – but at least we can sleep well  in our cardboard boxes at night.

3 thoughts on “Ut Oh! Another Browser Hijacked By the failing Ask.com

  1. Carol

    You also have to be very careful of some updates to good programs like Java, iTune etc. Always scroll down all the way and look before hitting install as there sometimes is a ck’ed box to install other add on’s lower on the page.

    Reply
  2. Vicki

    I have Malwarebytes Pro Version and lo and behold I found a toolbar for ask.com and the file was called askbar.dll, I believe. Now, I wonder why Malwarebytes didn’t remove it? Should I search through my registry for Webfetti, MyWay, iWon, etc?

    Reply
  3. Mae

    I have observed that when doing a google search that the first choices are prefixed with ask.com as well as other “services”
    I’m guessing that we have to be more aware than ever.

    Will Chrome allow your start page?

    Reply

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