It’s not uncommon for the realm of contemporary software to combine the useful with the intrusive. Omiga Plus , an application intended for organizing computer desktop, demonstrates this duality to the fullest. The vendor, Taiwan shui Mu Chih Ching Technology Limited, claims "Omiga Plus is the world's most popular desktop enhancement for Windows." While this might be a truthful statement, the program has been reported to indulge in questionably ethical practices.
After the app gets installed by the user it does enable creating customizable grids to arrange documents and program shortcuts in a fairly intuitive way, but at the same time the web browsing preferences on the computer undergo substantial modifications. Although this isn’t explicitly mentioned in the Terms and Conditions, said utility twists such custom settings as the browser homepage, new tab page and the default search engine. In other words, the user-defined web configuration gets altered without appropriate authorization, pointing to a third-party landing page at start.omiga-plus.com or isearch.omiga-plus.com. The site in question displays sponsored items, thus generating profit for the software authors.
According to Microsoft Safety & Security Center , this sort of activity falls under a distinct classification:
Browser hijacking is a type of online fraud. Scammers use malicious software to take control of your computer's Internet browser and change how and what it displays when you're surfing the web.
Since Omiga Plus tends to modify web browsing settings without clearly asking for user consent, it obviously exhibits browser hijacking characteristics. As per the research of this issue, the application adds an extension compatible with the most popular web browsers. It’s this add-on to blame for the outrageous distortion of the Internet preferences and, as a result, the redistribution of web traffic. Furthermore, none of the regular extension uninstalling methods is applicable in this scenario, which is why it takes a rather complex cleanup process to get the problem fixed and the correct settings restored.
To its credit, the Omiga Plus program is handy as it works wonders for organizing the desktop. On the other hand, the fact of imposing unwanted browser preferences is definitely on the minus side of the app’s feature set.
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