Conduit Search, also known as Search Protect by Conduit, is one of the few adware programs capable of infecting both Windows and Mac OS machines.
Officially, this
application is supposed to help advertisers gain new clients due to Conduit’s
custom Community Toolbar which can be tailored to fit specific business needs.
As users install this add-on to their browsers, the interested third parties
get new traffic to their sites. This sophisticated business model has one major
drawback, though – the people who get the toolbar run into serious web surfing
complications.
To begin with, this
program isn't really installed by Mac users as Conduit proper. It’s often bundled
with free applications, being a hard-to-find opt out in the installer packs.
Having made it into the system, the payload adds a new browser extension to
Safari, Chrome and Firefox. This add-on does not need user authorization to
modify some preferences for the above-mentioned browsers, in particular, the
homepage and default search engine. From that moment on, these values get
replaced with search.conduit.com, which is a traffic redistribution domain
containing ads, banners and other sorts of sponsored information both on the
start page and all subsequent results pages. Therefore, while the makers of
Conduit and business owners benefit from this cooperation, the affected Mac
users suffer from the inability to freely browse the Internet.
Here are a few tips
regarding this infection: first off, mind what you install, especially when
it’s freeware, and select custom setup instead of the default one so that you
can see all options. If Conduit Search is already on your machine, follow
removal recommendations listed on trusted Mac resources to get rid of it for
good.
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