Anyone in the Mac Power User Community had success removing the Bing re-direct virus/malware from a Mac? If so, how did you do it?
Download and run Malwarebytes for the Mac. It should fine a bunch of junk. Run it until it comes back clear; it may take a few rounds. After that, you may need to open your browser preferences and restore your homepage, and check for any plugins or extensions you don’t want.
Malwarebytes’s is apparently unable to remove this automatically, but offers these suggestions:
You can find manual instructions here (ignore the sales pitch at the end of the article):
Try this:
- Reboot your Mac in Safeboot by holding down the shift key
- Start Safari while holding down the shift key
- Open Safari preferences and enable > Advanced : check the “Shoe Develop menu in menu bar”
- Close Safari preferences
- Safari History: clear all history
- Safari Develop: empty all cashes
- Try to browse the web
- Keep us posted!
Rogier
One more thing:
- System preferences > Network
- Select your newtork (Ethernet / WiFi)
- Advanced
- Proxies
- Remove all proxies other then *.Local…
- The only box checked should be “Use Pasive FTP…”
Hope this helps,
Rogier
Go the System Preferences and see if there is a Profile that you can delete. A lot of new Malware programs create a Profile that prevents you from deleting them the old way. Malwarebytes is good but doesn’t clean everything.
What browser are you using? I have found the Chrome is being targeted the most and has the most issues when it comes to Malware removal.
Malwarebytes would’ve been my first suggestion to. If that didn’t work then possibly try CleanMyMac X. It has some malware removal stuff, that may help. I’ve heard from people that say it worked well and I’ve used it for general cleaning. May also help to clear out the cache.
I’ve tried Malwarebytes, it didn’t detect anything when I ran it on my Mac last night. I also tried Detect X, it, on the other hand, did find a few files that I removed. The re-direct hasn’t happened since then but I’m still not sure if the Bing virus/malware is really gone.
I’ll run through some of the other recommendations on this post just to try to be sure that the problem is resolved.
I do use Chrome, the problem only seems to occur while I’m using Chrome.
Reset chrome settings
This process is already set up this way when I went in to take a look.
The problem is still occurring. It is GD annoying af.
Did you ever figure out how to get rid of it? I recently installed something without realizing that it’s malware. All of my searches in Safari are now being redirected to Bing. I can’t change it whatsoever.
Even Malwarebytes couldn’t help me out.
I’ve always wondered why these redirect viruses almost always choose to redirect you to Bing…
Bing is the #2 search engine and also provides results for several other search engines like DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, and MSM. I’ve read that in total it provides more than 1/3 of all desktop search results.
FWIW, any time I suspect a computer has been infected with malware I’ve always wiped the drive and performed a clean install, then scanned the data before copying it back. In some cases it may have been overkill but I’ve seen antivirus fix one problem but not detect others.
Yes, I know that, but what is the incentive for those redirect viruses? Slightly worse search results?
That’s correct.
Why does anyone cause problems for others? For profit or to achieve some power over another? Maybe it’s just to make themselves feel superior. Or maybe these programs are the dark side equivalent of “Hello World”. In any event if Google disappeared tomorrow we could easily survive using Bing.
But the problem with any malware is we can’t be sure we know everything it has done to our computer. Which is why I chose a nuke and pave response to any of them. I may have wasted a lot of hours over the years by taking this approach but it allowed me to sleep better.
Search Baron comes to mind. They had a financial incentive.
Who is making all these Bing redirect viruses? Microsoft?
If only most people realized that…