I’m sorry to say I’ve made a fair amount of money ridding my customer’s machines of Conduit and its many friends.

Persistent little bugger.

You might be interested to learn that on a number of popular Lenovo laptops Conduit’s Search Protect is bundled with Lenovo Browser Guard. If you have a Lenovo laptop and you run MalwareBytes’ anti-malware scanner, then it will probably pick up that Conduit is installed.

In this case, you probably didn’t install it yourself. It came preinstalled with the Lenovo laptop.

Malware Bytes does a good job of getting rid of most of them, but not all. Look for Search Protect and a dozen other programs that come along with it.

I am sorry but I don´t. I got this over a year ago from someone else and when I installed 4 or 5 programmes came too, which ( stupidly ) I thought were part of the ADW Cleaner and installed them, there was a tool bar and a search engine both of which were quite tough to get rid of but I don´t remember details of any of them.

That’s very interesting, since its goal is actually to remove PUPs. Do you recall what programs it installed and from what country IP? These tests were made in the US, and by downloading it a few times through several methods we could’t find anything. However these downloads were also a moment in time, and they tend to rotate the PUPs in and out frequently. If you have more info regarding this that would be great so we can look into and possibly correct it :)

Thanks! We heard that several of our users like Unchecky as well. It looks like it works quite good, unless PUPs start to use other methods than opting-out such as opting-in or just download by force.

Very interesting observation, thanks for sharing! Sounds like they found some new outlets :)

I
recently bought my first ‘smart’ TV and was amazed at the EULA (aka:
‘Terms/Conditions’ 347pgs) and associated PUPs (aka: ‘Partner Services’ –
Yahoo, Adhub, SyncPlus…etc) that came up during installation. Here, as in the
apps noted above, they recommended that you just select the Privacy Policies
‘Express Installation’ (aka: “Accept All”). The other option was to
“Disagree” with the “Accept All” selection whereby you then got
to see the multitude of PUPS (recommended Partner Services) that would be installed
and each had a 30-50 page Privacy Agreement. I expect that soon we will need
Emsisoft to make an Anti-Malware program for TVs!

Spigot and a few others are a nightmare to remove. I unchecked all the options on a recent ‘free’ download, YTD, and it STILL loaded Spigot and a few other searchware, adware, add-ons under the radar. I would like to break a few legs at Spigot for wasting days of my time. The only software I could find to track them down was free trial SPYHUNTER 4. However you have to pay $30 to have the detections removed. The free 30 day licence never connects with the server. I had to track all references down by a slow trawl through REGEDIT and enter each code line (hours of cross-tracking). Cross-referencing
all the 200+ individual results.

Spyhunter showed some which I couldn’t even find with regedit ‘search’, so I left those as hopefully disabled when I eliminated the majority. Malwarebytes, for example, didn’t find any of the Spigot club PUPs. Likewise, none of my several anti-virus programs found anything.

Microsoft’s free ‘Security Essentials’ is a complete waste of time. In all the years I’ve used it, not once has it found anything
malicious. Even with a PC loaded with creaking junk.

‘Spybot, Search and Destroy’ is only slightly better than useless but nothing like what it is cracked up to be on its now-elaborate web site. Certainly not worth a premium.

Yesterday, by chance, I found thousands of unwanted search cookies in the registry, under ‘zones’. I gave up counting after 40 pages x 45 per page (1800 entries) and I had only reached the letter ‘c’..!