Cyber theft attempt or legitimate error message?
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Has anyone seen the below messages? I've been getting them since I tried to download Lavasoft Ad-Aware+. They appear whenever I restart my computer. The first message appears, then the second. Did I send a nefarious party my personal computer data? My search engines, Google and DuckDuckGo, do not appear to have been altered. Is there any way stop this from appearing? Thank you. ! Warning Your Search Engine has been modified to If you did not want your seach engine to be changed, revert it back using Web Companion. then: X Revert Failed Web companion was unable to revert your settings to its original state. Send your computer’s information anonymously to Lavasoft and help us gather the information needed to help you in the future. CANCEL SEND INFORMATION Details With your consent, Web Companion would like to gather the following information, encrypt it and send it back to our servers so that we can analyze what's inside our users' systems. This will enable us to detect and remove potentially unwanted programs better in the future. This action is completed only once and we will NOT gather any of your personal information. Installed applications • Display Name • Display Version • Publisher • Install Location • Install Source • Uninstall String • Quiet Uninstall String • External Uninstall String • Uninstall sub key
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Do you have Ad-Aware by Lavasoft on your machine and/or its plugin Web Companion?
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Ayespy, your question prompted me to check my CCleaner list of installed programs. I saw Ad-Aware Web Companion and uninstalled it. I had already uninstalled Ad-Aware + Anti-Virus but this program must have been residual. That should resolve the issue?
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It will resolve the issue of you getting the message. It will not resolve the issue the message was about, which was an attempted browser hijack detected by Web Companion (or at least activity Web Companion interpreted that way). I don't much like products by Lavasoft, but they are legit, and when they work right they perform a desirable service. So if Web Companion alerted on something, I would want to understand thoroughly what that was.
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Thank you again Ayespy. I will research the issue.
I've moved away from Lavasoft products now. As you've said, they can be good but, but there has almost always seemed to be a complication or problem. Also, Lavasoft's customer service is very poor, in my experience.
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