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Google Chrome infected with the Facemoods toolbar and search engine

Submitted by Druss on Thu, 2011-08-11 00:38

I tried searching for something in Chrome a few minutes ago and found that my search was being handled by something sinisterly named Facemoods. Aghast, a few more checks confirmed that I had a toolbar installed on my system of the same name, the Chrome search engine was set to Facemoods by default and that I had an extension installed as well. A little more digging revealed that all this was jDownloader's fault as it installs the toolbar during its own installation process. Not good.

Removing all this junk involves the following steps:

  1. In Chrome's settings dropdown, go to Tools and select Extensions.
  2. If you see the Facemoods extension here, choose to uninstall it.
  3. If you are prompted for a restart, do so.
  4. Again in Chrome, right click on the address bar and select Edit search engines.
  5. In the resulting window, you should be able to see that Facemoods is still the default search engine.
  6. Hover over the offending line and click on the remove icon (a cross) at the extreme right.
  7. If Google isn't now your default engine, hover over it and click on its Make default button.
  8. There is no Save button on this dialog. Just close it using the close icon (another cross) on the top right.
  9. Next, go into the Windows control panel and select Programs and Features (or Add/remove programs, I guess).
  10. Uninstall the Facemoods toolbar from this list.
  11. Just as a precaution, check all other browsers in your system to ensure that they are all uninfected. Restart them if need be.
  12. Finally, repeat after me over and over again: "I will henceforth pay more attention to each step of the installation process of any and every program."
  13. It could well be that simply uninstalling the toolbar from Programs and Features is all that is necessary to remove everything. However, one can never be sure (and I am not going to install the bloody thing once again to find out :).

    Hope this helps!