Q: Chum Search, Softonic adware/virus
I accidentally downloaded malware or something similar from Softonic, which caused a site called 'ChumSearch' to install itself on my 2013 Macbook air with El Captain along with random files such as H___Shopper and Mac Developer (can't remember exact names). I use google chrome, and noticed that Safari had opened on its own accord and put the Chum search extension onto my computer, and taken over my homepage. On google chrome I then searched the site, which went from my chrome search box to the chum search domain, to bing. It made all my searches go through BING, of all places!! I couldn't find any added extensions on chrome and the deleted extension on Safari made no difference.
Mostly I followed advice from the apple support page https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203987 and Linc Davis' comments on forums, but nothing got rid of it. I went through my folder ~/Libraries - you can find this by searching it in the box under Finder > Go > Go to Folder - and removed everything from the time and date of when I downloaded it, which was about a half hour before I noticed the virus luckily so I knew to find all the files from a time that was within a 2 min timeframe of when the virus installed, making the malicious files obvious. This is super important for anyone in this position, note the time that the virus was downloaded!! I went through this folder in particular and found heaps of these bad files ~/Library/Application Support/, but also recommend searching all the files in the ~/Library manually and putting them into the trash.
Even though this changed nothing to my google search/ bing dilemma, it is an important step to uproot any applications that may harm your computer further(check the applications folder as I had two unwanted programmes installed). I decided that the answer was somewhere in Safari where Chum Search had made itself more apparent, and made my way to a FAQ page http://chumsearch.com/search/FAQ/ which shows the correct ways to unistall the programme! All my problems were fixed, for now. Note that the chrome settings are out of date, so heres what I did:
Chrome > Settings > Search > Manage Search Engines
And deleted anything I found that wasn't anything I normally used. It then went away, as easy as that. I had tried everything, deleted and reinstalled chrome, searched my computer for viruses (completely ineffective) and deleted everything I could find from my Library folder and restarted my computer like 3 times. Like people have brought up, downloading anti-malware software can often put malware on your computer, and while something like Chum Search is controlling your computer do not trust ads for anything as the site works to display malicious ads.
Additional Helpful links:
How to avoid or remove Mac Defender malware in Mac OS X v10.6 or earlier - Apple Support
Posted on Jun 19, 2016 5:29 AM