Mac adware and browser hijackers tend to be treated synonymously these days, because most browser-targeting threats are hybrid and call forth a mix of noxious symptoms. If a sketchy ad is recurrently popping up in the middle of web surfing sessions on different websites, it means that the root cause for the issue resides in the system rather than the web services being visited.

Web surfing is indispensable to user experience, no matter how prosaic it sounds. With this in mind, malware makers have focused on targeting browsers for years. From a cybercriminal’s perspective, one of the top reasons to take this route is that web navigation tools are comparatively easy to exploit. The authors of Smokyashan, a malicious Mac app that skews its victims’ Internet preferences to promote junk services, are ramping up their attempts to become major players in this shady niche.

To make the most of a web browser, one of the first things on everyone’s to-do list is to customize it. Assigning preferred values to the homepage, default search engine, and new tab setups is a threefold shortcut that makes the online pastime smooth. But what if a user is deprived of this prerogative? Such a situation isn’t uncommon, and it always boils down to adware such as Shroomcourt. Here is a report on this strain that includes, among other things, applicable removal steps.

When downloading apps from outside Apple’s official marketplace, Mac users can never be sure that the software of choice is safe. The bad news is, there are myriads of rogue installation clients throughout the Internet. Although they appear to be useful and benign, their real purpose is to push malicious code such as Kuklorest under the guise of something free and nifty. The next thing the victim knows, the web browsers start defaulting to search.kuklorest.com without due permission.

The schemes leveraged by Mac adware authors are dynamically morphing toward higher complexity so that their infections are moving targets. With the invariable objective being about a sketchy redistribution of the victims’ traffic, malefactors regularly switch to using new components of their browser hijack algorithm. The searchsnow.com website reflects this approach as it now fuels the long-standing Bing redirect hoax alongside older counterparts that have gained a bad reputation in the macOS environment.

As indispensable as they are, web browsers are a weak link in computer security and get exploited big time. It might seem the reason is that people use them to visit various sites, some of which can be hacked or malicious – and that’s partially true. However, the biggest scourge is what the users download and what kind of harmful software can sneak inside the Macs this way. The QSearch virus story is just like that.