Ipswich boy Ribald from the X century, turned the bark into a carrier of personal data, combining a drawing of his father and his name. Personal data is understood as a set of information that allows you to identify an individual - a set that unambiguously indicates a specific person. In some jurisdictions, like European countries, personal data is a broad term and may include various quasi-identifiers that may lead to the identification of a particular person.

Ideally, personalization of online experience should be a piece of cake these days. In fact, that’s one of the fundamentals of modern web browsing practices – users can easily define various Internet navigation shortcuts in the blink of an eye. Apps like AnySearchManager, however, demonstrate that tampering with this prerogative is just as simple. It hijacks browser defaults on a Mac computer and prevents the admin from undoing the changes.

In the online ecosystem where search providers are more than welcome, there shouldn’t be room for major players’ monopoly. Whereas the less prevalent services also belong in this environment, there are numerous rogue ones like search.anysearch.net linked to Any Search Manager malware whose pursuit is restricted to intercepting users’ web traffic and monetizing it beyond authorization.

From a technical viewpoint, it isn’t difficult to hijack a web browser regardless of the operating system it’s running on. It suffices attackers to force-install an application that intrusively puts certain browsing defaults into effect and doesn’t respond to the infected user’s manual troubleshooting attempts. This is exactly what happens as far as the ChumSearch contamination incidents are concerned.

The sad truth is that the uncrackable security of macOS is a myth debunked quite a while ago. Ransomware, crypto miners, browser hijackers and adware compose an incomplete list of cyber threats successfully targeting this platform. To its credit, though, Apple keeps the scale of these attacks much lower than on competing operating systems, making malicious agents come up with non-standard workarounds like the recently discovered EFAIL compromise vector.

As the phenomenon of furtive cryptocurrency mining splashed onto the scene and took the world by storm, computer botnets underwent an apropos evolution. Rather than bolster spam campaigns spreading ransomware, they are now leveraged to combine numerous zombified machines into a huge Monero mining pool.