Friday 16 September 2011

Seeearch.com Browser Hijacker (Uninstall Guide)

Earlier this week, we received an email from our reader Anne, who lives up near Paris, and we thought others might be interested as well. Anne said that she had a hard time finding how to change home page in Internet Explorer because the home page box was grayed out. Her default home page was changed to seeearch.com.



Of course, she didn't know what exactly could have caused this and was struggling to find out what was the main culprit. After quite a bit of research, we found out that she installed a program called Mega Player from one of those free video streaming websites. We installed it too and confirmed that Mega Player changed the registry, there were settings disabling "HomePage" and "Start Page" registry keys.



There is no way to change your home page without editing Windows registry and we all know that not everyone is comfortable with firing up the Registry Editor and delving into its data. No wonder why seeearch.com is one of Alexa's Top 1000 ranking websites in France. In just the last month, the seeearch.com traffic has increased dramatically.



And here are some of the top search Queries for seeearch.com:
  • comment supprimer seeearch
  • comment enlever seeearch
  • desinstaller seeearch
  • supprimer seeearch
As you can see, there are a lot of unhappy people searching how to get rid of seeearch.com.

Mega Player changed the home page in Mozilla Firefox too. Google Chrome was not affected. You can't change the home page in Mozilla Firefox easily as well because there is a file user.js which restores the the home page back to seeearch.com once you restart your web browser, so you need to delete it manually.



To restore your default home page and remove seeearch.com web hijacker, please follow the instructions below. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below. Good luck and be safe online!


Remove seeearch.com in Internet Explorer:

1. Go to Start, type “registry” in the search box, right click the Registry Editor and choose Run as Administrator. If you are using Windows XP/2000, go to StartRun... Type "regedit" and hit enter.

2. In the Registry Editor, click the [+] button to expand the selection. Expand:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer

Select Control Panel and look on the list to the right for an item named “HomePage”. Double click on it and set its value to “0” (zero).



Then select Main (below Control Panel) and look on the list to the right for an item named "Start Page". Right click on it and select Delete. Close the Registry Editor.



3. Open Internet Explorer. Go to ToolsInternet Options. Select General tab and click Use default button or enter your own website, e.g. google.com instead of seeearch.com. Click OK to save the changes.


Remove seeearch.com in Mozilla Firefox:

1. Go to Start, type “%APPDATA%” in the search box and hit enter. If you are using Windows XP/2000, go to Start → Run... Type "%APPDATA%" and hit enter.

2. Go to Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[RANDOM CHARACTERS].default folder. Delete file names user.js.



3. Open Mozilla Firefox. Go to ToolsOptions. Under the General tab reset the startup homepage or change it to google.com, etc. That's it.


Associated seeearch.com files and registry values:

Files:
  • %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[RANDOM CHARACTERS].default\user.js
Registry values:
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Control Panel "HomePage"
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main "Start Page"
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