how to remove weknow.ac virus

People use Chrome on snow leopard, because Apple dropped support updates on safari in older OS's, and perhaps 20% of websites on the internet do not load or work properly. I use Firefox instead.. but hardly use the web on a snow leopard machine other than on my home network, unless I need to and know where I am going online is safe. I never trusted Chrome.

I tried this and it worked. One thing I had to look up was how to find "Terminal"

In a Mac it's in Applications, then click on Utilities, then Terminal App.

Once open a box will show. Then you simple type each line like you said and hit return after.

It worked. Thanks.

This worked great on the surface, but when I looked in chrome policies, it still said this: defaultsearchproviderkeyword with policy value being http://search-operator.com/search.php?q=%s.

Can you help with this? Thank you!

Yeah, I got that but you made it a point to say she spoke to 2 Senior Advisors who could not resolve this. They would not be able to resolve an issue within Chrome as they can only support Safari as that is an Apple web browser.

There are too many respondants on this thread. It is impossible to keep track of who is responding to what. Please start a new thread. Not to mention, the discovery of the Terminal solution if not solving it should be addressed in a new thread, saying it does work for whomever it does not.

I followed the instructions from ChanelCinq and I was not successful. Strangely, every line I copied into the terminal would result with a new line being placed with my user name. I would them hit the enter button, and then my user name would appear again. Here is a copy of my screen print. What am I doing wrong?

This is helpful but I can't seem to figure out how to change the command lines for the affected policies. I can see them but don't know what opening up the Terminals means. Can anyone advise? This is a very insipid virus and I have been working on it for hours to no avail. Very frustrating.

The terminal harkens back to the day before the graphical user interface. It is run from Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal on your hard disk.

A cursor follows a prompt at the end of the line, where you type everything you need in one line.

The prompt in this case is normally a $ sign.

If you receive a series of one line commands with multiple words and symbols, each individual command line separated by a line feed, needs to be entered followed by the enter key to take place.

Mac OS X at its backdrop is a mix of FreeBSD and NetBSD Unix, which Apple has modified to become the language of Darwin.

Unlike MS-DOS all the directory paths use the / slash between them.

Please start a new topic thread if you are running into trouble running the commands for this disinfectant series of commands.

My mom had this virus and was unable to remove it. I was helping her and tried everything I could, plus she spoke with three Level 2 Apple techs and in the end, they could not help, but FINALLY, these instructions solved the issue. This was posted by Skanson on another post. I changed around the instructions just a bit to make them more clear. If you have tried the other stuff and cannot remove the virus try this. It has worked for me and others.

"weknow.ac" changes a group of Chrome policies so as to set a new default homepage, new tab behavior, etc. You can see your current Chrome policies by typing chrome://policy/ into your URL bar. If you're infected, it should be very obvious as the half-dozen or so policies changed by weknow will be displayed.

Use the command line to delete / modify the affected policies. You do this by opening up "Terminal" and copy and paste each of the following entries below. I did each one at a time. I copy and pasted the first line and then hit enter and then went to the next until I had finished all 6 below:

defaults write com.google.Chrome HomepageIsNewTabPage -bool false

defaults write com.google.Chrome NewTabPageLocation -string "https://www.google.com/"

defaults write com.google.Chrome HomepageLocation -string "https://www.google.com/"

defaults delete com.google.Chrome DefaultSearchProviderSearchURL

defaults delete com.google.Chrome DefaultSearchProviderNewTabURL

defaults delete com.google.Chrome DefaultSearchProviderName

Quit Chome and restart it and voila the virus will be gone. I tried everything and 3 phone calls with Apple and this was the only thing that worked.

thank you so much

I can't find original solution for getting rid of we know.ac.

Check long posts on page 1 of this thread. You need to make some changes using terminal

I am using safari.

I am using safari. Are there any different instructions for Safari?

can someone please explain the terminal step more clearly... i am very confused because it is not working and I need to remove this dumb virus lol. thank you