What is Safebrowsing.biz and how to get rid of it

In this article I want to tell you about a new malicious program, which had infected tens thousands of computers in the past few weeks. This program is called Safebrowsing.biz, and it is a hijacker. This means that it sneaks onto your computer, and begins to manipulate the search results. Whenever you are looking for something on the Internet - Safebrowsing.biz substitutes results, and inserts there the links to suspicious, useless or even malicious websites. The program itself is not dangerous, however, the more time it dwells on your PC, the more the chance your PC has to be infected by viruses.

What is Hijacker and how to deal with it

Hijackers, such as Safebrowsing.biz are not a serious threat, and experienced users rarely become their victims. However, even the most experienced user may not notice that his PC was infected by Safebrowsing.biz. If you remove Safebrowsing.biz as soon as he got on your PC, it won’t do much harm. However, if it will stay in the system for a week or more - then your computer will become clogged with all sorts of unnecessary programs and viruses. If you are not the only user of your computer, then you should doubly careful, because the second user can be a young child, or a person who does not pay attention to cyber-threats.

So what’s the reason to develop hijackers? You experience discomfort when using your PC, because of Safebrowsing.biz, but it is unlikely that web-scammers really care about it so much. So why create a program that does not benefit, and is only annoying people? In fact, the purpose of Safebrowsing.biz is not to bother you. Its goal is to trick you into visiting certain websites. The links that Safebrowsing.biz shows you in each new tab are not random. There are the links to sites whose owners have paid the scammers for "advertising". Actually it isn’t even advertising, you just receive lots of links, banners and pop-ups, and sometimes you may click on one of them accidentally. But even the single click may bring harmful consequences. To get rid of these inconveniences you just need to remove the hijacker and restore your browser options, and we will tell you how to do it.

Why Safebrowsing.biz is dangerous

The danger of hijackers lies in the fact that they have access to your data. At first it will be only the search results. The virus knows what you are looking for on the Internet, know what sites you visit, and which social media you use. In addition, it learns what payment system you prefer and banks in which you have the accounts (if you make any payments from your computer). Believe me, this information may be useful to thousands of scams and hijacker will transfer all this info to its creators. After that, you may just click on a malicious link, and accidentally download a keylogger that steals your passwords, and then absolutely innocent-looking program will result in the loss of all money from your bank account. But, such terrible things may happen only if Safebrowsing.biz will be left unattended for a few weeks.

Safebrowsing.biz is so effective, because it hides under the guise of a useful software. Many users think that if program is called “Safebrowsing”, it will provide safety when you browse the Internet. But hey, that’s not so simple! “Safe” and “search” prefixes are the most widespread in hijacker names. Program may be called “supersafe.search” or “searchdeals” or whatever, but these trashy programs just can’t search anything! These are just hollow frames, which use the Google’s search results, and mix the malicious website addresses there.

Safebrowsing.biz became extremely popular in the last weeks, infecting more than ten thousand computers. Immediately after infection Safebrowsing.biz begins to make changes in your browser settings. This is to ensure that the virus could show you more ads, and the browser does not interfere with his actions. Usually hijackers change the home page, the default search engine, and, occasionally, changing the properties of the browser shortcut. All of these changes are reversible, and you can make them both manually and with the help of anti-virus program.

We hope that this article has helped you to understand what are hijackers, in general and what is Safebrowsing.biz, specifically. If you still have questions about Safebrowsing.biz, or you want to see detailed, step by step instructions to uninstall this program - visit our official website. You will find everything you need in an extended article titled "How to remove Safebrowsing.biz completely".