If you know me, you know that I swear by Malwarebytes. I use it on all computers – Mac or PC for initial clean up and to get rid of obvious malware. One of the categories of items that Malwarebytes finds and deletes is what they call PUP files, or potentially unwanted program files.
What are these files and why am I mentioning them? These are programs that you probably don’t want and did not download and install on purpose. You might have clicked on the wrong thing or didn’t see a checkbox when doing another download but now you have this new “junk” on your computer, and you don’t know how to get rid of it or even how it got there.
There are many different programs that fall into this category. A few I have dealt with are OneLaunch, Wave Browser and Shift Browser.
This is why I always tell people to make sure they know what is installed on their computers. If you see any of these icons on your desktop, get rid of these programs immediately!
These all work the same. They take over and become your default browser. They try to look similar to either Chrome or Edge hoping you won’t notice. What they really do is force you to use their search engine to build up their numbers and force you to go to websites you wouldn’t normally go to. I saw a customer just yesterday and he told me that Edge opens up every time he logs into his computer. He demonstrated this for me, and it turns out it was Wave not Edge. Since the colors were similar, he didn’t notice. Once we uninstalled Wave, he didn’t have a browser pop open each time he logged in.
I have seen these redirect you from a real site to a fake site. As I said before, I don’t know exactly how they get installed, but I know it isn’t from people going out and looking for them. If you see these on your computer, you should immediately uninstall them and make sure your preferred browser is set up as your default and your preferred search engine is also your default.
If you are not sure how to uninstall these, or you just need help identifying if you have these or similar “pup” files on your computer let me know and I can help get rid of them. It will probably improve your computer speed.
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