Extensively customizable browser homepage is undoubtedly a good thing, where users can add shortcuts to favorite sites and drop handy widgets. The whole concept and convenience of having these features at one’s fingertips is often abused by profit-driven individuals such as the authors of Binkiland . This service appears fine and dandy at first sight, providing both a web service enhancement (WSE_Binkiland) and the Binkiland Browser program. Upon a closer scrutiny, though, the app conceals quite a few security and privacy issues that aren’t stated upfront.
First off, Binkiland is hardly even installed as a standalone entity, sticking to a software bundling model instead. A diversified network of affiliated free utilities is covertly hosting the potentially unwanted payload. The covertness consists in a barely perceptible indication of the extra item that goes along with the main install. A fairly predictable general profile of such an accomplice app includes the following features: it is free to install and use; it is entertainment or system maintenance related; and it has questionable origin, except for the cases where uncertified versions of reputable software are injected with the malware. Some of these programs are Windows Essentials Codec Pack, Windows Version Installer, Kurulum, and maliciously twisted installer instances of Adobe Flash Player. When dealing with the above, it’s strongly advised to review the setup terms carefully and definitely refrain from opting into the recommended setup options.
While the above-mentioned Binkiland Browser isn’t harmful itself, it tends to be installed with an add-on that affects the rest of the web browsers running on the computer. The homepage, default search engine and new tab page preferences in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera get modified by said extension, starting to resolve binkiland.com instead of the user’s custom values. This activity implies recurrent traffic rerouting instances to the adware’s landing page , which is designed like a rather commonplace search provider. However, this service is forcibly imposed on you, and searching for arbitrary information on binkiland.com returns more ads than relevant results.
Yet another frustrating aspect about Binkiland is that the respective WSE cannot be uninstalled in a regular way, that is, by manually trashing it via browser’s native add-on removal feature. And to top it off, the malicious app gets privileges that enable it to track the victim’s web surfing activity patterns for accurate ad placement, which in essence is a privacy violation. In order to break the loop of these constant redirects, affected users should adopt several troubleshooting vectors such as restoring the distorted settings to their correct values, uninstalling both the malicious program and the associated helper object in browsers, and cleaning up the system registry from possible fragments of the infection.
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