{"id":3889,"date":"2012-02-27T16:47:16","date_gmt":"2012-02-27T21:47:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/?p=3889"},"modified":"2012-02-27T16:49:35","modified_gmt":"2012-02-27T21:49:35","slug":"ut-oh-another-browser-hijacked-by-the-failing-ask-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/ut-oh-another-browser-hijacked-by-the-failing-ask-com\/","title":{"rendered":"Ut Oh! Another Browser Hijacked By the failing Ask.com"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Hijacked<\/a>Joe’s Firefox has been hijacked by Ask.com
\n<\/strong>My firefox browser has been Taken over by something called ASK I cannot remove ASK in the control panel. HELP.<\/p>\n

Our answer<\/strong>
\nHi 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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 with Ask. If it’s been more than a few weeks your best bet would be to use\u00a0Malwarebytes<\/strong><\/span><\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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% \u00a0share.<\/p>\n

In a recent search engine market survey – Google was #1 with 65%, Bing (Microsoft) had about 13%, Yahoo had about 12% and Ask had \u00a0around 3%.<\/p>\n

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 \u00a0in our cardboard boxes at night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joe’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\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3890,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1655,1462,1656,1654,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3889"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3889"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3892,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3889\/revisions\/3892"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}