THERE IS NO CHARM IN CHARM SEARCHING
A couple of days ago I noticed a very strange thing happening with my Windows 10 laptop. No, not the usual constant updates that make me crave my Chromebook.
No, the problem I had was whenever I searched for anything it was redirecting me to something called charm searching dot com and that would take me to bing where it would come up with the search results and not Google which is my default search engine.
Have you heard of it? Despite its name there's nothing charming about it. I certainly hadn't been acquainted with it. Then I did my research and what I discovered made me scared to use my laptop.
Charmsearching is the name of a fake search engine and browser hijacker. When your computer becomes infected with this malware your searches are redirected to this fake search engine. There is a chance of your personal data being heavily compromised.
I had to eradicate this dangerous nuisance and fast.
GET OFF MY LAPTOP!
I tried several things - including downloading Combo cleaner - that people who seemed to know what they're talking about suggested. A quick scan took over 4 hours and found absolutely nothing.
I checked all my browser settings and blocked the search charms website.
But no matter what I tried, including uninstalling and reinstalling Chrinrm
SOLVED - Check your Chrome extensions if you have any👍☺️
Thankfully, then I came across a discussion group and they suggested that chrome-extensions could be the problem. Apparently these extensions which I find useful when they're not screwed up my computer, can work perfectly fine for months and even years only to be corrupted.
Methodically I disabled them all and one at a time I enable each extension and checked to see if I still had charm search. Eventually it was gone. No more redirects when I put in a search.
The culprit in my laptop's case - an extension that takes screenshots that I had been using for months with no trouble.
If I get any more problems the first place I'll head to is extensions.
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